It seems as if the Asus EEE Pad Transformer is little more than a ghost in Android’s Honeycomb machine.
Once again, the ever-elusive tablet has “sold out” (*cough*) within seconds of being listed on both Walmart and K-Mart.
“Darnit! Happened again. For the record, it was allowing me to enter billing and shipping information before I wrote this up,” Phandroid’s Quentyn Kennemer explained in an obviously frustrated blog post.
“Now it’ll only go as far as the checkout page before it yells at you and tells you it doesn’t have any stinking Transformers in stock. It happened so fast that the main product page hasn’t even updated yet. Bummer.”
Meanwhile, an Asus spokesperson told Engadget the Asian-based company was airlifting tablet “shipments” into North America for eager Android enthusiasts.
“We are ramping production every week to address the supply concerns, including almost daily air shipments into North America… We expect the supply line to improve significantly over the coming weeks.”
Earlier this month, Asus spokesperson David Chang claimed there would be a “significant alleviation” of the shortage by June.
“If the demand continues to increase substantially then we will have to continue to ramp up production in order to fulfill customer demand,” Chang told Netbook News.
The spokesperson also confirmed Asus had manufactured a mere 100,000 units for May, but would raise the number to 200,000+ in June.
Personally, I’m not holding my breath and neither should you. Really, the continuing shortage does not portend well for those who had hoped to snap up a Transformer in June – as it is almost the end of May.
Unfortunately, there aren’t that many alternative Honeycomb tablets available at the current time.
But as Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang recently opined, next-gen Honeycomb devices – some of which are likely to be showcased at Computex 2011 – will probably get it right.
“We’re expecting another wave of tablets that are coming out to the marketplace now, ones that are even thinner and even lighter than the best offerings from anyplace, any supplier in the world,” said Huang.
“And those devices are just in the process of ramping. There’s the really exciting new build of Honeycomb 3.1 that Google just demonstrated [and] we are basically stitching that up now.”
