Leaked sales and pre-order numbers for the Amazon Kindle suggest it is shaping up for a massive launch, according to Cult Of Android, which cites a verified source within Amazon and screenshots.

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Despite taking the ebook off the Kindle market she had, oddly, still been seeing returns for it show up on her Kindle dashboard.

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Amazon, she says, could offer a tablet below cost and make it up by selling content, as it does with the Kindle.

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To make the text larger than 10-point font requires zooming in on the document and dragging it around with the iRex's stylus, a naggingly slow process given E-Ink's refresh rate of about one second. iRex claims it redraws its screen faster than Kindle, but in Forbes.com's tests it locked up sporadically and often took far longer to refresh than Amazon's less flashy display.

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Amazon dodges any similar issues with its Kindle Fire tablets, because it didn't sign up to the same alliance.

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That MSRP, almost certainly lower than Microsoft's own cost, would line it up against the Nexus 7 and even the Kindle Fire.

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This would be a good sign for the iPad Mini, but it could also be that the Kindle Fire is built from the ground up (by Amazon) to be a shopping and consuming device.

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Our own experience also found that the refresh rate of the Nook (with its latest software update) is now about on par with this new Kindle refresh rate, so it's fair to say that some of the competition is catching up.

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