Because of smartphones, pocket TVs were never a thing.
As a kid I imagined the future as being able to hold a TV in your pocket, and flying skateboards. For the latter I guess electric scooters will have to do
I know it's semantics, but if your great-gramps would time travel to today, he would ask about your pocket TV, and you would reply nah, it's a smartphone
Which is actually not smartphone, but a general purpose computer with cell internet connection that can be used for many things, one of those is actually calling.
No, because your smartphone needs internet, tv signals reach way more places, and more reliably.
Especially since broadcast tv, in America ya damn Limeys, is free, while internet is either very localized (WiFi, etc…) which may or may not be free, or wide spread (Cell phones, Satellites, etc…) which are definitely pay.
Here, in the middle of nowhere, like a town with 1500 people was the biggest thing in 20 miles or so, we got about 10-15 channels without even having the antenna outside the house, plus surrounded by forest.
We have more OTA channels, you just have to pay for them. The free channels are in shitty SD quality (you have to pay for HD) and they are only unencrypted because the government requires it (as they are used for emergency broadcasts).
Absolutely! (Same as playing a regular game on a Game Gear.)
I had both an AC adapter and a 12VDC car adapter for mine. Without those (considering the sorry state of rechargeables back then), the cost of batteries would've made actually using the damn thing untenable.
I disagree, the watchman and clones existed into the 2000s and were tech found in several households. Ours ended up with some of the tornado kit so we could get news broadcasts in power outages and other emergencies.
Gimmick/niche isn't an appropriate description for technology that was superceded by smartphones, even early ones.
I think some of the folks in this thread might enjoy the Techmoan channel on YouTube. It's not about pocket TVs in particular, but he does review and restore old AV tech. It's a fun channel if you're into retro tech.
i had several battery operated 'pocket' tvs of various sizes... 80s/90s.. the best being the watchman...
somewhere around 2005 i saw one in a mall, used, for sale. i remember thinking it would only be valuable for a few more months as they were about to switch everything to 'digital broadcast' and it would be completely useless.
I had one that had the same form factor as a gameboy. It was black, the screen had a resolution so tiny you could not really make anything out, and it was almost impossible to get a stable signal. But I loved it when I was 12 years old, because I was only allowed to watch tv for an hour every day, and nobody knew I had that tiny TV which I bought from the money I made delivering flowers.
I still have it in a box somewhere.
No? Searching for "digital picture frame" brings up pages of results. These are popular enough because they are much cheaper than an equivalently sized tablet, e.g. a 10 inch digital picture frame details for around $150, which is less than half the price of a crappy android tablet.
Also, tablets don't really exceed 12 inches or so in size, but you can get digital picture frames as large as TVs.
I had a pocket TV back in 2007 or so. It had an antenna and everything. It was a bit bulky and not at all power efficient, though. IIRC it went through 8 AA batteries in about 3 hours.
I’m not sure why you’d want that over a smartphone or even just a small tablet, though.
Also, we have flying skateboards, they’re just prohibitively expensive or not yet being sold. Look up the ArcaBoard (was $20k back in 2015, doesn’t seem to be sold anymore), the Lexus Hoverboard, and the Flyboard Air. Unfortunately if you try to buy a “hoverboard” you’re just gonna end up with an electric scooter
There absolutely were pocket TV's. As a kid, even, I owned two of them. They are now of course functionally useless because they predate the switch to digital television by a significant margin. Both of mine were Realistic brand ones, which was an in store label for Radio Shack. Color LCD displays, telescoping antenna, and they ran off of 4 AA batteries. They were about the size of an OG Gameboy or a large Walkman.
I might even still have one in a box of tech junk somewhere. I believe the second one was a Realistic Pocketvision 27.
You can still buy a portable digital TV. These were always a bit of a stretch for a "pocket" television, more the size of a small tablet but thicker. But they totally did, and still do, exist.
You missed the point of my very unelaborate shower thought. I see how not being a thing could be understood as never existed. I meant a big thing like, you know, smartphones
I lived in Seoul, S. Korea back in 2012 and my Samsung Galaxy S3 phone (maybe a Galaxy S2) I got over there had a built-in TV tuner that picked up several OTA Korean TV channels. It was crazy that the phones had that. I barely spoke or understood Korean so I didn't use the feature but it was super cool that the option existed.
There are so many neat features that they just gave up on.
I’m typing this on s motherfucking phone that can detect doors and measure at a distance, really really fucking accurately somehow, has all kinds of other fancy shit, but I can’t use it to listen to the radio without internet.
Fucking smart devices killed so much cool shit.
Don’t get me wrong it’s awesome that I can change the channel on my tv from damn near anywhere if I have to remotely fix it and all, but I’ve never once had to do that.
I used to play shit on the Alexa to mess with the wife and kids from wherever, but that got old quick.
Although, my ex-wife does still have that thing, and we are still sharing an Amazon account…