Asus boasts it'll outship other tablet makers, except iPad

Asus is ramping up production of its EeePad Transformer tablet and wants its competitors to know.

Asus CEO Jerry Shen was quoted yesterday in the Taiwan Economic News saying that he plans to outship all other tablet makers this month. Except for the iPad.

Asus will ship 300,000 of the 10-inch Android tablets in the month of June, according to Shen. That, he points out, is an increase over the 200,000 per month Asus was shipping in April and May. Shen believes the tablet will account for 10 percent of Asus' revenue.

His comments appeared to be aimed mostly at one of its biggest rivals, Acer, which is currently selling a nearly identical 10-inch tablet, called the Iconia Tab. But the group of competitors also includes the Motorola Xoom, Research In Motion Playbook, Samsung Galaxy Tab, T-Mobile G-Slate, and the HTC Flyer.

And though it's not out yet, Hewlett-Packard, with its solid retail partnerships, will start pushing its Touchpad in pretty large volume starting July 1. Oh, and the Toshiba Thrive will come just two weeks after that.

It'll be pretty easy to get lost amid all those names, so Shen's comments are likely just a way to keep his company's tablet in the news.

It's also important to remember that shipments are not the same as sales. And since the deluge of Android Honeycomb-based tablets began in January, there haven't been many indications that they'reselling all that well. Dell this week said it chose to launch its own 10-inch Android tablet first in China over the U.S., citing "confusion over what exactly Android is bringing to the table [and] an immature platform."

And Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang thinks Android tablets started off with the wrong configurations--not enough apps, no Wi-Fi-only option--and that the industry is slowly correcting itself, though it's taking some time.

Apple, meanwhile, said on Monday it's sold 25 million iPads in 14 months.