Amazon’s 7 inch Android tablet that isn’t an Android tablet, the Kindle Fire, has been out in the United States for a few weeks now. Sadly, for everyone else on the planet it isn’t. According to the folks at Know Your Mobile, that’s soon going to change, at least for the UK. They say that the Kindle Fire will launch as early as next month in Jolly Ol’ England. No other details, such as the all important price tag, were revealed. Now to be completely honest, we don’t buy this rumor. History has a way of repeating itself, so let’s look at what happened with the first Kindle. It came out in November 2007, was out of stock until April 2008, and it never left America. The second Kindle came out in February 2009, got a massive price drop a few months later in July, and then it finally launched as an “international version” in October. So it took Amazon nearly 2 years to get the Kindle from the USA to the EU. Does anyone seriously think that these guys can honestly launch a Kindle in the UK just 2 months after launching it in America?
Amazon isn’t commenting on how many millions of Kindle Fires they’ve sold thus far, but we’ve got a sneaking suspicion that a $199 tablet isn’t going to have any problems selling by the millions. In fact, we covered rumors out of Taiwan suggesting that Amazon had to bump up their initial order of 3.5 million Kindle Fires to 4 million and then again to 5 million after seeing how many preorders they were getting. Note that preorders were only available to Americans!
What’s likely going to happen is that we’ll see a second generation Kindle launching at some point in 2012 that’ll eventually be shipped abroad. There are rumors of a 8.9 inch version, which make sense since it’ll likely land for 199 British pounds, which translates to roughly $315.