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We're sure you heard the rumors when hanging out in your ASUS fanboy haunts, wearing your ASUS logo hats and medallions, talking your crazy ASUS lingo with your fellow ASUS scenesters. Or maybe you thought something was up when Amazon sold out immediately. Either way, there has been plenty of chatter in the gadgetsphere as of late about the Eee Pad Transformer. Why is it so hard to find? Are component shortages to blame? Quality control issues? We've heard plenty of speculation, and now ASUSTek spokesperson David Chang is weighing in on the matter. According to  Netbook News , the company has seen overwhelming demand for the device, and is currently planning to put 100,000 units on the street in May, followed by an additional 200,000-plus in June. "If the demand continues to increase substantially," said Chan, "then we will have to continue to ramp up production in order to fulfill our customers' demand." You know, that's exactly what we would do if...

So, it seems that ASUS' Eee Pad Transformer has been hard to find, at least in part due to reasons other than customer demand. According to  Netbook News , the Taiwanese company is having trouble sourcing the supplies needed to build the tablet / keyboard combo in sufficient numbers. For now, that means only 10,000 Transformers a month -- a fraction of the 300,000 ASUS was reportedly hoping to make. Word on the web suggests components in greater quantities are coming soon, and production will ramp up significantly in June. Until then, would-be owners will have to go the beg, borrow, or steal route to get one. Investing in a horseshoe or four-leaf clover might not be a bad idea, either. Netbook News

Well, as far as delays go, this is looking like one that ASUS is willing to accept. As the company explains on its Facebook page, demand for the Eee Pad Transformer has apparently been so high that the first few batches have sold out "much quicker' than it had planned. That's left the global launch for the Honeycomb tablet a bit up in the air, with the company only directing folks to its Facebook pages for individual countries for more information, although they unfortunately aren't providing much in the way of details at the moment. That delay apparently won't affect the US launch, though -- at least not to any significant degree. According to the upstart website  JoannaStern.com , the Transformer will be hitting the US by the end of this month with a price tag of $399, while the keyboard dock will run you $149. Could we possibly be seeing the beginnings of a tablet price war? Here's hoping.  ASUS (Facebook) ,  Joanna Stern

Each week Ross Rubin contributes Switched On, a column about consumer technology. Last week's Switched On discussed how some next wave notions from a decade ago were trying to reinvent themselves. Here's one more. Surging smartphone vendor HTC is seeking to bring back an input method that many wrote off long ago with its forthcoming Flyer tablet and EVO View 4G comrade-in-arms: the stylus. A fixture of early Palm and Psion PDAs, Pocket PCs and Windows Mobile handsets, slim, compact styli were once the most popular thing to slip down a well since Timmy. Then, users would poke the cheap, simple sticks at similarly inexpensive resistive touchscreens. After the debut of tablet PCs, though, more companies started to use active digitizer systems like the one inside the Flyer. Active pens offer more precision, which can help with tasks such as handwriting recognition, and support "hovering" above a screen, the functional equivalent of a mouseover. On the ot...