Amazon: We're Selling Over 1 Million Kindles a Week!

Amazon is sitting on a mountain of money thanks to the high demand for its new Kindle products this holiday season.

There's a good chance Amazon has just reinvented the tablet industry with the release of its Android-based Kindle Fire. Typically the phrase "you get what you pay for" accompanies a device with an incredibly low pricetag, but in this case, consumers are getting a real bargain... when the device actually works, that is.

After fondling Amazon's new gadget for less than a week, we've concluded that it has a lot of spunk for $200, more than you'd expect from something less than half the price of an iPad 2. Even more, there's a little back door that allows users to side-load Android apps, letting them change the UI (aka Launcher) to something more Android-like, and load apps not listed on Amazon's Appstore.

That said, it's no surprise that Amazon is selling more than one million Kindle units per week for the third straight week in a row. The company nods in recognition of the efforts made by its new $79 Kindle, the $99 Kindle Touch and the $149 Kindle Touch 3G, but the meat of the sales over the last month is reportedly due to the Kindle Fire itself. As Amazon states, it's the #1 bestselling, most gifted, and most wished for product across the millions of items available on Amazon.com.

"Kindle Fire is the most successful product we’ve ever launched – it’s the bestselling product across all of Amazon for 11 straight weeks," said Dave Limp, Vice President, Amazon Kindle. "We’ve already sold millions of units, and we’re building millions more to meet the high demand. In fact, demand is accelerating – Kindle Fire sales increased week over week for each of the past three weeks. People are buying Kindle Fire because it's a simple, fully-integrated service that makes it easy to do the things they love – watch movies, read books and magazines, listen to music, download apps, play games, and surf the web."

Whereas the Kindle Fire is a full-featured tablet with access to magazines, movies, TV shows, music, books, Android apps and more (sorry, but Gameloft's Order & Chaos Online looks great on this thing), the latest generation of the original e-ink based Kindle weighs less than 6 ounces and sports a 6-inch screen, making it an easy fit into your pocket. The more expensive "Touch" versions add a touch screen so that users can flip through ebook pages with the swipe of a finger. All three even offer Wi-Fi connectivity, but the 3G model allows users to download books on-the-go without having to hunt down a public access point.

"Our family of Kindle e-ink readers are close behind Kindle Fire on the Amazon.com bestseller list," Limp added. "Customers continue to report preferring their Kindle e-reader for long-form reading, and in fact we’ve seen many customers buy two Kindles – both a Kindle Fire and a Kindle or Kindle Touch – this holiday season."

For those who have purchased the Kindle Fire, non-Amazon Appstore apps can be installed by heading to Settings/Device and turning on "Allow Installation of Applications." Kindle Fire owners then should head to Amazon's store and install a file manager like ES File Manager to access and install retrieved APK files. To get the APK onto the actual device, simply email it to yourself and then check your email from the device. Attachments are then sent to the "Download" folder on the SD card.

As seen here, some of the best Android apps to side-load include Dropbox, Dolphin Browser HD and the Go Launcher for changing the UI to something other than the bookshelf. OnLive is (unofficially) a little flaky, but Pogoplug works just fine.