Hasbro’s Comic-Con Transformers toy turns into a (fake) tablet

Can there be any doubt that tablets are truly ubiquitous when Hasbro figures out a way to make a robot turn into one of them? These e-reading and media consumption devices are everywhere, so it’s just about time we saw a Transformers version.

Kotaku reports that this years Comic-Con exclusive Transformers toy from Hasbro is a version of the Decepticon Soundwave who appears to turn into a tablet. Not a functional tablet, alas (wouldn’t that be something?) but then, the version of Soundwave I grew up with in the ‘80s wasn’t exactly a functional boom box, either.

The toy is actually based on the design of a Chinese exclusive figure that was a collaboration between Chinese electronics company Xiomi and Hasbro (and the subject of the YouTube video below). And whereas I thought that making flat “cassette tapes” that turned into robots was an impressive piece of engineering, making something big and flat turn into an actual three-dimensional robot figure is pretty impressive.

And as Kotaku writer Mike Fahey put it, “I love the idea of a tablet taking the place of his original cassette recorder form from the ‘80s—something people carry with them all the time that’s become so pervasive it’s basically invisible.” That was the point of the original Soundwave’s boom box form, after all, and this new version becomes a device with a very similar use. These days, people use tablets much like they used to use boom boxes back in the ‘80s: for playing games, consuming media—and, of course, reading ebooks.

I wonder if they could come out with a version of Laserbeak that turns into a Bluetooth speaker?