Black Friday Sales Are the "Best Ever" for Kindle Tablets

On Monday, November 28 Amazon reported that Black Friday sales of its Kindle tablets were the highest that Kindle has ever seen.

"Black Friday was the best ever for the Kindle family—customers purchased 4X as many Kindle devices as they did last Black Friday— and last year was a great year," Vice President of Amazon Kindle Dave Limp said in a statement. "In addition, we're seeing a lot of customers buying multiple Kindles—one for themselves and others as gifts—we expect this trend to continue on Cyber Monday and through the holiday shopping season."

So far, Amazon has not released the exact sales figures from Black Friday, but clearly they are going to be impressive. Of course, it was the Kindle Fire that was at the top of all the Kindle sales charts. Consumers have been pumped about the Kindle Fire since it was first announced by Amazon. In late October the Amazon chief Jeff Bezos said that the day that the Kindle Fire was announced was the “biggest order day ever for Kindle.” He went on to say that the Kindle Fire had doubled the amount of pre-orders from the previous Kindle launch.

Target offered plenty of tablet options on Black Friday including the Kindle Fire, Motorola Xoom, Asus Eee Pad and Acer Iconia, but the company reported that the Kindle Fire was the store’s best-selling tablet this past Friday.

Best Buy also reported impressive sales of the device. Wendy Fritz, senior vice president of computing, tablets, and e-readers at Best Buy, commented on Kindle Fire sales saying, "If this Black Friday was any indication, they are only getting hotter as we get into the shopping season."

In general Black Friday shopping online and in-store went up from last year. "Despite some analysts' predictions that the flurry of brick-and-mortar retailers opening their doors early for Black Friday would pull dollars from online retail, we still saw a banner day for e-commerce with more than $800 million in spending," said comScore chairman, Gian Fulgoni, in a statement. "With brick-and-mortar retail also reporting strong gains on Black Friday, it's clear that the heavy promotional activity had a positive impact on both channels."

Data has just been released from a survey that was conducted by the National Retail Federation showing that there was an estimated total of 226 million shoppers this year compared to 212 million in 2010. According to the NRF, the brick-and-mortar and online shopping totals are the highest that they have been in the past five years.

"Each of the top online retailers generated significantly greater Black Friday activity compared to last year," said Fulgoni, in a statement. "Amazon.com once again led the pack, with 50 percent more visitors than any other retailer, while also showing the highest growth rate versus last year. However, it is telling that the top multi-channel retailers also showed strong growth in visitors, demonstrating the importance of the online channel to the retail industry as a whole."

"Consumers are clearly demonstrating their desire to spend this holiday season, but are far from throwing caution to the wind when it comes to how much they will spend on gifts," said Phil Rist, executive vice president at BIGresearch, in a statement. "Retailers will have to stick to an aggressive holiday promotion schedule to keep consumers interested."

Sources: PCMag - Amazon Reports 'Best Ever' Black Friday Kindle Sales, PCMag - Black Friday Spending Up 16.4% From 2010 and PCMag - Nov. Online Spending up 15%; Black Friday, 26%

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Motorola Mobility Up, While Motorola Reports Overall Loss

Motorola reported that its Motorola Mobility has sold 440,000 Xoom tablets and 4.4 million smartphones in the second quarter.

Motorola went on to report a $56 million loss this quarter, compared to $80 million in net earnings during the same period last year; however, Motorola Mobility reported a revenue of $3.34 billion, up from the $2.61 billion in revenues that was reported last year.

While Motorola’s phone business reported a loss of $31 million on the sales of $2.4 billion, Motorola’s home division reported a profit of $62 million on revenue of $907 million.

Despite the fact that overall Motorola lost money this quarter, according to an AP report, Sanjay Jha, the chairman and chief executive officer of Motorola Mobility, remains hopeful. He said that by the holidays Motorola will release at least one more 4G smartphone and two 4G tablets.

Jha did also comment on the fact that Motorola’s third quarter earnings will not be as expected, due to the delay of the Droid Bionic, as well as a lower amount of tablet computers, lower prices and a seasonal decrease in the sales of set-top boxes.

"In the second quarter, Mobile Devices launched several new smartphones in the U.S. and markets around the world. Revenues grew over 40 percent driven largely by Latin America and China where sales more than doubled year over year. Our Home business delivered another strong performance, and we introduced several innovative products and services for next generation multi-screen video solutions," Jha said in a statement. "With a focus on profitable growth and delivering differentiated LTE smartphones and tablets, we expect to achieve profitability in Mobile Devices in the fourth quarter and for the full year 2011."

Motorola is currently predicting that its third quarter will either allow them to break even or show a very small profit.

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10.1-inch Honeycomb Tablet Coming from Samsung this Sunday?

Whoa, whoa, whoa, hold the phones! Could Samsung be launching a Galaxy Tab 2 with Honeycomb this Sunday? If so, it is definitely a bit of a surprise to the tech world.

According to sources from Pocket-lint, Samsung will be launching a 10.1-inch tablet on Sunday night complete with Honeycomb as the start of Mobile World Congress. According to what we know so far, the device will be thinner and lighter that the current Samsung Galaxy Tab, will have a bigger screen and be featured in black as opposed to white.

Running Honeycomb, (Android 3.0) Samsung is hoping the new tablet will be able to hold its own against some of the more popular devices out there like the Xoom from Motorola and the dominating iPad from Apple. Pocket-lint sources also believed that Samsung was considering launching a 9-inch tablet at the same time, making it appear that Samsung didn't really have a full plan laid out. However, it appears now that this is untrue.

Specifications are scarce on this device. What we do know is that it will have a dual-core Qualcomm chip as well as an 8-megapixel camera. It has also been released that this Galaxy Tab will be physically smaller than Apple's iPad, even though it has a moderately larger screen than Apple's device.

I guess we will figure out more details concerning this tablet, which is still without a name, on Sunday. Samsung's first Galaxy Tab did o.k. but couldn't really hold a candle to the iPad. But then again, what device could? Maybe this next generation device will be different. One can only hope.

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