Given the increasing popularity of cellular telephony over the last few decades, it was perhaps inevitable that a toyline like Real Gear Robots would include a compact, hand-held phone as one of its innocuous devices... And, in fact, the concept has even been revisited since, with the 2017 au X TransFormers line of INFOBAR figures, featuring Optimus Prime, Megatron and (of course) Bumblebee, created as a promotion with the Japanese-made devices.
Weird as those are, though, they're not a patch on the abject insanity of the attempt Hasbro had made ten years earlier. Here, I present what must surely be the nadir of the Real Gear Robots line... Read on, if you dare!
Even for a mobile phone of the 'flip-phone' variety, circa 2006, Speed Dial 800 was a little on the comically large side. Not just in width and length, but - perhaps most particularly - in depth as well. Phones of this type could easily be smaller, and (if I remember correctly) Real Gear Robots were closer to the Scout class pricepoint than Deluxe, so there was no need for it to be so large, except to accommodate a reasonable transformation... But, as will shortly be revealed, that's not what Speed Dial 800 gets.
What's really strange, handling this toy, is the difference in quality between this and some of the others. While the plastic on others felt pretty much of a par with the mainline toys, this one feels discernibly cheaper in-hand. Despite its small size, it feels more hollow. Because it's trying to represent a fairly simplistic real-life object, it's not exactly covered with sculpted detail or paintwork. There's a teeny display on the front of the flap inside a silver-painted disc, volume controls on one side, power button on the other, both painted silver, and then a section of the flap is painted with a nice metallic blue. The mini display - for notifications, I guess? - is represented by a sticker showing the Autobot insignia, and the time 7:47, referencing the date of the first live action movie's release. The back of the phone features some perfunctory linework detailing that looks pretty meaningless, though it would appear that at least some of the circular details are covers, glued into place over screw holes. At the top of the phone, there's one of those little rings for attaching phone charms (looking back, I almost can't believe those were a thing... but it's tempting to dig out the 'transforming' rubber phone charms from the first movie's more desperate merchandising - or maybe even find a compatible BotBots figure - and tie it on for the full effect), and a large camera lens because, yes, even those ancient phones were capable of taking photographs for some reason.
Inside the phone is a decent sized, but shallow-sculpted keypad, with alphanumeric characters stamped on in light blue. Up the top are control buttons for the phone - the obvious ones being 'pick up' and 'hang up' phone icons, with the others seemingly referring to the 'MENU' and 'SELECT' text on the display screen's sticker. Between these buttons is a non-functional scroll-wheel detail, and the whole button panel is painted metallic blue. The display, framed with silver paint, features a sticker of the approximate size of a phone screen from that era, again showing an Autobot insignia, and the time 7:47. Right at the top, it has the typical signal strength and battery level indicators, along with what appears to be a notification bell. The very top of the flap has a recessed detail representing the speaker, while there's a tiny notch below the keypad representing the microphone. One curious detail of this toy, and not one that would have been especially common in phones of that era, is that the flap can rotate, possibly for ease of taking selfies..? Presumably the mini-display would show what the camera was seeing, otherwise it would be a bit of a useless feature...
Robot Mode:
Ant it's here that the idea of Real Gear Robots - or at least Speed Dial 800 - having started life as pound shop knock-offs is really cemented. He looks ridiculous, ugly, poorly-engineer... and very, very cheap. The torso is made up of the bulk of the keypad, while the outer sections fold down to become 'legs' with insanely long shins, thighs that are so short as to be almost non-existent, and the most perfunctory 'feet' I have ever seen. His arms are spindly things ending in ridiculous claws (albeit claws with the standard 5mm grip, making him - unironically - about the most useful Real Gear Robots toy), and feature the only robot mode-specific paint applications - blocks of metallic blue that do nothing to disguise how hollow his forearms are. Making matters worse, the flap of the phone remains on his back, completely unaffected by transformation, and looking like a cross between a cape and a huge backpack due to its bulk.
The saddest thing about this toy is that... there's really nothing more to say. It is astonishing - considering how good even the earliest movie toys were, in and of themselves - that there's more to say about this TransFormers toy's alternate form - a cellular telephone - than there is about his robot mode.
The head sculpt, such as it is, basically sits within the hinge for the flap section. The oversized camera lens is his 'eye', and then a very bland, basic, humanoid face - from the tip of the nose down - is revealed by opening a couple of flaps. There's no tech detailing on these flaps, so the only detailing is the tiny sliver of nose, a mouth with a very pronounced upper jaw, and a little chin strap with some sculpted linework. This section is painted with the same metallic blue as the buttons now on his chest, but it does more to highlight how crap the face is, than it does to improve it in any way.
As one might expect, Speed Dial 800 has a simplistic transformation. The legs pull out and down from the sides of the phone (with a strong chance that they'll come apart at the thigh rotation joint), the feet flip out, then the shins rotate round to face forward. With the legs out of the way, the arms can be pulled out from the sides, the shoulder slid up into place. Open the phone, rotate the top part 180°, then the flaps covering the face need to be pulled aside... and that's it. Everything about it feels cheap and nasty.
Given that his arms feature ball joints at the shoulder and elbow, it's no surprise that his upper body is reasonably well articulated. The arms can rotate a full 360° at the shoulder, raise 90° out to the sides, while the elbows offer just over 90° bend and 360° rotation, and the wrists can bend through about 120-130°. Naturally, there's no waist joint (though there's no good reason why not - there's certainly enough space), but the hips' range of motion is only restricted by the protruding sides of his chest. The thigh rotation joint offers the full range of 360°, but generally prefers to separate from the knee joint, which is comparatively stiff. The knee offers well over 90° bend but, again, the lower leg is more likely to separate from the thigh when trying to move it, and the 'foot', such as it is, only moves for transformation. Possibly the worst aspect of his articulation is the head: whether the head rotates because of the phone mode's camera gimmick, or the camera can rotate purely so the robot's head can move, the two are inextricably - and inexplicably - linked. This means that, while the joint allows 360° rotation, that relies on getting the entire flip-phone flap out of the way, which then looks ridiculous and overbalances him.
The fact that I even purchased Speed Dial 800 is proof positive that I really got caught up in TransFormers toy collecting again thanks to the original 2007 Michael Bay movie, and Hasbro's marketing juggernaut. The idea is sound, and the other figures range from being great fun and well engineered, to what I would describe as 'tolerably bad'. Speed Dial 800 isn't even that good. Everything about him screams 'cheap crap', and the frustration of trying to pose him without his legs popping apart is off the charts, before you even realise he's very tricky to pose in a way that allows him to stand.
It is a very rare TransFormers toy that has substantially more play value in its alternate mode than its robot mode. If I ever write a 'Top Ten' list of worst TransFormers toys in my collection, Speed Dial 800 would very likely be number one.
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