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 mean… They were a thing before smartphones.
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.
Instead now we have giant smartphones mounted to the wall
it even runs android
And cars killed horses. Sometimes literally.
there were a few pocket tv’s in the 80’s, the most famous being the Sony Watchman! Itty bitty little 2" black and white screen and the antenna was tall as me and the battery lasted about 45 minutes but it was still super cool.
Seiko even had one that was an actual wristwatch
But it’s only ever been niche
So really its:
Because of primitive battery technology, ubiquitous pocket TVs were never a thing.
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Gimmick/niche isn’t an appropriate description for technology that was superceded by smartphones, even early ones.
in its 18 year run there were over 65 models of just the Watchman alone, with many millions sold in japan and NA! They weren’t niche at the time, high school kids had them, I owned a boombox with a 2" CRT and we were not particularly well off. If you went to a baseball game lots of people in the stands had them to watch the broadcast replays.
TV was huge pre-internet. check out this article about the NA release of the Watchman
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
As most of the other comments point out, pocket TV did exist and you have exposed yourself as:
- Younger than the smartphone
- Never watched a 90’s movie with a security guard in it
Both wrong
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1st smartphone Galaxy Spica age 26
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These TV wouldn’t fit in your jeans
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
Watch season 1 episode 8 of friends, Joey has a pocket tv to watch the football game at a funeral.
And that was mid 90s, 10 years before the hand tablets of today.
(…)a big thing like, you know, smartphones
I’m unsure what you think Netflix or YouTube TV are, but they are indeed on my smart phone, which goes in my pocket.
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I mean they literally are, you can watch literally any tv show or movie on them so I don’t see a difference.
Sure but they aren’t TVs. A TV can normally only do TV shit.
Tele-vision
Far-away sight
For when you need to see something that isn’t touching your eyeballs
And tablets killed those digital picture frames. Because why have those when you can just prop a tablet down and have it on slideshow mode.
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.
$150 is cheap to you? Um, okay then…
Indeed
I am old enough to remember portable tvs.
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.
And actual pocket TVs. Interesting to see OP think they were never a thing. Don’t get me wrong, they were shit, but they did exist!
Sweet summer child. It was a thing.
if you primarily watch videos with your smartphone, couldn’t you call it a pocket tv?
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.
Do they?
I can watch my local TV channels from the other side of the planet. I don’t think the signal reaches that far.
With internet
Your point?
That that is the difference to me, a tv has a built in tv tuner, otherwise it is a streaming device.
So? Not sure why the difference matters. What is even the use or a tuner anymore?
Tuning into OTA broadcasts.
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
Or, I would reply yes, totally. It’s called a smart phone, and load up the literal television app called YouTube TV
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.
why would you want only pocket tv when you already got pocket everything?
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.
I miss fm radio tuners in phones.
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…
Funnily enough the bottom of the barrel budget phones usually have an FM tuner. My 2021 Motorola has one.
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.”Also, my TV provider’s app allows me to watch live TV on my phone.
Not a pocket tv, but we had radios that picked up tv signals. Those were pretty popular. We had several when i was a kid. You could still buy them fairly recently - before the digital thing. We used to take one camping for local weather reports.
