The Transformers' Bumblebee showed up on the CES show floor this year, though we have to say he was more than a little worse for wear. According to reports, he'd been out drinking all night with David Caruso at the Bellagio, and couldn't find his keys when he woke up... which we're sure you can imagine is a major problem for him. When we requested an interview, the alien robot claimed he wasn't feeling too well, and asked if we had a swimming pool and two gigantic Alka-Seltzer tablets.

Pretty friggin good Bumblebee model, right? What would you think if we told you it was done in paper? We know, right? Totally a cut above the rest. Ahem.

[Thanks, Sonic]

Joining the curious workhorse UMPC / tablet PC arena is the xTablet T8600, which boasts about its ruggedness, barcode scanning, and magnetic stripe reading abilities that it handles when not checking your email and making dinner reservations on the go. Furthermore, the unique design allows for a backlit numeric keypad and directional arrows to be installed beside the 8.4-inch SVGA display, and internally, you'll find a 1.1GHz Intel Centrino processor, up to 1.28GB of DDR2 RAM, a "dual digitizer / touchscreen standard," integrated 802.11a/b/g, shock-mounted 40GB hard drive, optional EV-DO / EDGE / GPRS / GSM, Bluetooth, a nine-pin serial port, and a Li-ion battery that can reportedly keep things running for "up to seven hours." To account for all the beatings it'll presumably endure, it sports military-grade water-, dust-, and shock-proof characteristics, and can also operate at extreme temperatures. Hope you aren't too excited, though, as there's no word just yet regarding pricing or future availability.

[Via PCLaunches]

Although UMPCs haven't exactly caught like wildfire for one reason or another, Berkeley Varitronics Systems is hoping to make a splash in the spectrum analyzer niche with its vividly colored BumbleBee. Touted as a tool for "investigating and troubleshooting corporate wireless networks," BVS' machine is capable of measuring VoIP, 802.11b/a/g, Bluetooth, WiMAX, cordless phones and video, RFID, and broadband public safety data networks. Aside from packing goods that a vast majority of average joes will have absolutely no use for, the three-pound handheld houses a 1GHz Intel Pentium M processor, Windows XP Tablet PC Edition, a seven-inch WVGA touchscreen display, 1GB of DDR RAM, 40GB hard drive, Ethernet, an SMA connection port, and gets powered by four AA cells. While it's doubtful you'll be using all this hardware to check your inbox, it does give you user-selectable power triggers, three pairs of markers, spectrogram, histogram, video smoothing, and waveform averaging, and a PIP mode that allows viewing of live and recorded data. For those still with us, the BumbleBee is purportedly available in two separate forms, one with omnidirectional antennas covering 902 to 928MHz, 2.4 to 2.5GHz, and 5.15 to 5.9GHz, while the other flavor just handles 2.4 to 2.5GHz and 4.9 to 5.9GHz. Of course, all this analyzing won't run you cheap, as each unit clocks in at a whopping $4,500, and if you're thinking about interfacing with Windows XP mapping software, you'll be looking at an extra $2,500 for that luxury.

[Via Slashgear]

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]