Kinect is Selling 2X as Fast as the iPad

The iPad was crowned the fastest-adopted consumer electronic device ever last month, stealing the title from the once-coveted DVD player. Records are made to be broken, though, and the Microsoft Kinect has already come out of the gate twice as fast.

25 days after its launch, Microsoft said today that it has sold 2.5 million motion-detecting Kinect devices. Granted, that includes sales over the Black Friday shopping holiday, but reviews of the device have been positive. Apple took twice as long to sell its 2 millionth iPad. These seem to be the days of the radically new interface.

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In May of 2010, Apple announced that it sold 2 million iPads after two months of availability. At a base price of $500 each, that meant that Yankee Group analyst Carl Howe’s prediction that the iPad would become the fastest consumer product to hit $1 billion in sales in history was proven correct.

ReadWriteWeb’s Audrey Watters reported in October that the iPad kept up a torrid pace for months. “The iPad sold 3 million units in the first 80 days after its release in April, and its current sales rate is about 4.5 million units per quarter,” she wrote. That pace of sales, according to analysts at Bernstein Research, made it the fastest growing consumer electronics device of all time.

Now this. The Kinect sells for substantially less than the iPad ($150-$399 at Best Buy vs. $500-$830 for the iPad) but more have been sold in the product’s first 25 days than were sold in the first 60 days after the iPad launched.

Can the Kinect sustain that rate of sales? Only time will tell, but early adopters appear likely to spread positive word of mouth about the product – as will Microsoft’s massive advertising machine. For context (and to put a grain of salt in play here), the Wii has sold 75 million units in 4 years. That’s a little bit more than 50k per day, on average.

For now the Kinect is focused on game play, but some people believe it’s only a matter of time until it becomes the interface for many other tasks, from browsing the web to controlling various devices around the home. If Microsoft learns as well from the nascent Kinect jailbreaking community as Apple has from the iPhone jailbreakers, the Kinect could soon gain official support for all kinds of different uses.

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