Lenovo claims Samsung shifted just 20,000 Galaxy Tabs in 2010

CHINESE PC VENDOR Lenovo has claimed that rival Samsung managed to flog just 20,000 of its Galaxy Tab devices.

The claim comes despite no evidence to back it up, and from one of Samsung's rivals, so we are taking it with a pinch of salt.

Samsung's Galaxy Tab was the first major competitor to Apple's Ipad, with the firm announcing that it had shipped one million tablets in 2010. However there has been some back peddling on that figure, which at first was widely reported as Samsung having sold a million Galaxy Tab devices.

After Samsung clarified that the figure was actually the number of tablets it had put into the channel, then people started to guess at just how many of those devices actually were sold. Now Lenovo's director of consumer products and pricing for Western Europe, Andrew Barrow has told the Guardian that Samsung sold only 20,000 Galaxy Tabs in 2010.

Barrow went on to claim that any tablet maker trying to undercut Apple's Ipad would end up losing cash, saying, "any [manufacturer] would be giving money away". That certainly seems to have been the case for HP, with most people estimating that it made a loss of between $100m and $200m on its Touchpad fire sale.

Samsung is always very cagey about sales figures. The INQUIRER spent a week trying to get an accurate sales figure from the firm for its Samsung Galaxy S II smartphone and Barrow makes a vital distinction between those units shipped in the channel and devices that have been purchased.

While Samsung is unlikely to have sold every single Galaxy Tab it shipped, the 20,000 figure does seem a bit on the low side.

When The INQUIRER pressed Samsung for a response to Barrow's claims, we were told that the manufacturer did not comment on sales figures.

Whatever the final figure is, it will be interesting to see if companies start to announce actual sales figures rather than meaningless shipment claims. µ