Transformers Movie toys transform green paper into silver plastic

Like Howie Mandel, the Transformers have been given yet another shot at a career -- but unlike Howie, we are like, totally love the Transformers. We'll do our best not to wax on with all the Transformers lore and all, but we'll just say the death of Optimus Prime made some pre-pubescent Engadget editors reevaluate their young lives. So it's with no small amount of nostalgia that prior to the release of the Michael Bay Transformers live action movie later this year, Hasbro's launched a new line of change-'em-up-robots. The new Prime, which keeps kind of in line with his original old school truck body (we have mixed feelings about the painted flames) will drop for $40 on June 2nd; a cost-crazy 14-inch tall 1/14 scale $80 Ultimate Bumblebee comes out this fall; also look forward to the $30 Optimus Prime Battle Rig Blaster (hey, wasn't that Megatron's gimmick?), and the $30 Prime Voice Changer Helmet, which makes your tykes sound a little more like Peter Cullen than you might like. Oh, how joyful this resurrected 80s mania for robots makes us.

[Via Autoblog]

Sony claims Blu-ray "winner" in format war

That's it folks, let's pack it up and go home: the format war is over. Or at least so says Sony, which is bragging about some solid numbers from the month January. Reportedly two Blu-ray Discs were sold for every one HD DVD last month, and while HD DVD standalone players still edge out Blu-ray by a slight margin, PS3 sales have given the Blu-ray camp a solid win for the month. Numbers are still hard to read, due to disparate launch titles and quantities for Blu-ray and HD DVD, but the 25 Blu-ray movies and 11 HD DVD movies give a good impression of the current trend. Reportedly HD DVD sales are growing, just not as fast and Blu-ray, and Sony seems to think they have it in the bag: "We have a critical mass of content, we have the biggest mass of consumer electronics companies in the world supporting this format. That has moved Blu-ray into the forefront." And despite the fact that Universal Studios is still holding out on putting its movie on Blu-ray -- the last of the studios to do so -- Sony would like to let consumers know it's alright to come out of hiding. "The message that we're going to put out to the consumer now is, now it is safe to make a choice. No more fence-sitting is needed." We can't blame Sony for trying to spin these numbers as a win, it's pretty clear that consumers are wary of committing to one format while another is still alive and kicking, but we're afraid this might be calling the game a tad prematurely.

[Via Engadget HD]

Sandisk intros 8GB iNAND embedded flash drive

It may not be 16GB, but Sandisk's new embeddable 8GB NAND flash drive is still pretty darn spacious as far as these things go, so much so that the company's deemed it necessary use an extra letter to fully express the drive's expansiveness. Dubbed the "iNAND," the drive is fully JEDEC-compliant (that's Joint Electron Device Engineering Council, for those that have better things to memorize) and SD bus-compatible, designed for use in just about anything that needs to cram a lot of storage into a small space, including cellphones, PDAs, MP3 players, and GPS devices. It looks like we'll still have to wait a while before we see one of these actually turn up in a device, however, with SanDisk only just now distributing engineering samples for testing and evaluation, with mass production slated to get underway sometime in the third quarter of this year.

[Via Tech Digest]

Nokia's YouTube features in action

We weren't exactly sure what sort of level of integration to expect from this YouTube and Nokia dealio, and now we've got some legit video proof that's simultaneously promising and disappointing. On the plus side, the YouTube videos seem to be easy access, and are accompanied by a nice collection of other RSS-subscribable vids, which makes content consumption much less of a chore than it can tend to be on phones. It's also nice to see that the YouTube channel being accessed seems to be for the most part a stream of YouTube's featured videos, so you can keep up with what all the cool kids are watching. Unfortunately, it looks like the selection stops there: no search or browsing capabilities to speak of. From the looks of things, you might be able to subscribe to other YouTube channels, but it seems that dreams of free-roaming mobile access to YouTube content will have to be put on hold for the time being. What we do know is that more partnerships are in the works, so hopefully YouTube will keep on trying out partners until somebody actually gets it right. The video is after the break.

[Via Ring Nokia]

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