Amazon Kindle Fire Tablet ODM Orders Allegedly Cut in Half

Amazon's Kindle Fire Tablet continues to be the retailer's best-selling product, but the post-holiday slow season doesn't seem to have spared it.

Since the Kindle Fire is one of the hottest products on the tablet market right now, market watchers are paying more attention to it than they do most everything else.

After all, since the item is one of the foremost representatives of its device class, it goes without saying that its fate would be closely monitored.

That said, there are some fairly conflicting reports running around the web at the moment.

One of them was made by Digitimes a few days ago and says that Amazon has cut in half the amount of orders it placed with ODMs.

In other words, Amazon itself expects demand for the gadget to drop by half, or at least by an amount significant enough to suggest that reducing the inventories is safest, for now.

The other report is based on sales charts and suggests that the device is still very much at the top of its maker's best-selling list.

Having been launched only a couple of months ago (November 15, 2011), it quickly became one of the most popular products for the Holidays.

One might say that the $199 (154 Euro) price left no room for failure, which is more or less true in a world where other slates sell for $500/470 Euro.

Kindle Fire is repeating the precedent that the Kindle e-reader set when it became available years ago.

Riding the wave of the ever increasing collection of digitized books, the original electronic reading gadget enjoyed the top best-seller position as well, for months even.

It is unclear how much longer the Amazon Kindle Fire Tablet will hold that spot, but even with 3 million orders instead of 6, those are still millions of potential shipments.