Amazon, Kindle Fire | featured news

Wal-Mart Stores Inc. is phasing out the sale of Amazon.com's Kindle Fire tablet and Kindle e-readers, the second major retailer to stop offering the items in six months... Retailers are trying to fight a growing practice called "showrooming." That's when shoppers, armed with smartphones, browse products in physical stores and then shop online for a better price.

Amazon says buyers of its new Kindle Fire HD tablet will get the option to turn off the advertisements that appear on its standby screen for $15. The online retailer showed off the tablet last week, and said there would be no option to turn off the ads. That was a departure from Amazon's previous policies. It has shipped Kindle e-readers with "Special Offers" ads on the standby screen, but users could pay to have them turned off.

Amazon's new Kindle Fire HD boasts a much more vibrant screen than the original tablet that came out about a year ago. That makes buying movies and TV shows to watch on the device a lot more appealing....

Amazon.com quenched the Kindle Fire on Thursday, saying its first tablet computer is now "sold out." The Internet retailer has a major press conference scheduled for next Thursday in Santa Monica, California. It's widely expected to reveal a new model of the Fire there, so the announcement that the first model is "sold out" suggests that Amazon halted production a while ago to retool for a new model.

The Kindle Fire turned out to be a popular device largely because of its comparatively low price tag. it was the first sub-$200 tablet (by a buck) that didn't feel like a $25 device you'd expect to find in a Fisher Price catalog, and as a result, Amazon closed out the fourth quarter of 2011 with a 14 percent share of the global tablet market,...

With the rumblings from Amazon about the early success of its new Kindle Fire over the holiday season, the company’s disappointing fourth quarter results came as a surprise. More surprising was Amazon’s silence regarding total Kindle Fire sales for the quarter. During the earnings call, Amazon’s executive team deferred questions about the device to the press release, which simply regurgitated sales data from December.

The Kindle Fire is…on fire. Despite some mixed reviews from the pundit class, consumers have flocked to Amazon‘s first entry into the tablet market. Stifel Nicolas analyst Jordan Rohan in a new research lifted his estimate for the company fourth quarter Fire sales to 6 million units from 5 million. He also raised his financial estimates for the company, asserting that the Kindle and the Kindle Fire have effectively become the third major mobile ecosystem after Apple iOS and Google Android.

The trio of Kindle e-readers took the three top places on Amazon’s best sellers on their site. In fact, over one million Kindles have been sold per week for the month of December. Every country that has an Amazon site showed the Kindle Fire as their top-selling product.