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
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.
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 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Gimmick/niche isn't an appropriate description for technology that was superceded by smartphones, even early ones.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 used one as recent as the mid 2000's. There was some sporting event going on (probably women's world cup) and I wanted to watch the game while playing in Ultimate league. Streaming wasn't as prevalent as it is now and the game was on OTA channel.
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.
What are you even on about? I have a screen in my pocket where i can watch quite literally every movie that exists.
Imagine being a time traveller and someone asks you if you have any cool tech like a pocket tv.
"Hah, no kiddo, we dont. I have that screnn with access to movies and tv shows tho."
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 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).
I thought it was random as fuck when I worked at Walmart, I was asked to clean out the traps in the freezer (like a liquid channel for spills) and I found a pocket TV from the 90's stuffed in there, still in the packaging. This was only a few years ago; that thing had to have been in there for at least 2 decades.