Fire Kindles blazing holiday sales

While Amazon famously refuses to provide specific sales numbers for its Kindle range of readers and tablets, it has confirmed that it sold "well over" a million units a week for the whole four week period leading up to Christmas.

Research analyst company Morgan Keegan has predicted around 5 million Kindle Fires were sold which, if correct, would easily make it the largest-selling Android tablet so far. The secret to its success is its price, selling in the 'States for $200 which handily undercuts all other tablets including Apple's iPad and even RIM's heavily discounted PlayBook.

Android's share of the tablet market, initially lackluster, has begun to accelerate with a number of brands and models gaining traction, but ominously for competitors, the Kindle Fire has demonstrated that a good price point will be attractive to the buying public. So much so, in fact, that the market dominant iPad has likely suffered a significant drop in its own market share. Morgan Keegan are expecting the iPad's sales to have been affected by as many as 2 million units by the Fire alone, with their estimate for the December quarter down from 16 million units to 13 million.

The iPad sold 11.2 million units in the previous quarter, which suggests a growth in the December quarter of nearly 2 million, but this rate of growth is significantly slower than previously and notably weak in what has always been Apple's best quarter for all its products. On the other hand, the Android tablet share has been demonstrating an increased growth rate even prior to the Fire's launch. So the figures for the tablet wars are likely to show the iPad as having suffered a dramatic loss of market share when all the Q4 research is reported.

Source: Morgan Keegan

NPD research shows tablet users avoiding cellular data connection

At least in the Yoo Ess of Eh, the proportion of cellular-connected tablets, already a minority, is trending even lower.

Between April and October this year, the percentage of "WiFi-only" tablet connections increased from 60% to 65%, at the expense of the "WiFi plus cellular" and "cellular-only" segments. As you'd expect with a device that relies on connectivity to function as intended, the percentage of "no connectivity" users basically halved - although you have to wonder what on earth that latter group actually uses their tablet for at all.

Graphic courtesy of NPD