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
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 am old enough to remember portable tvs.
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!
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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.
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.
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Would this require feeding it batteries like a triggerhappy machine gunner?
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.
Probably! According to Wikipedia you get 3-5 hours off of 6 AA batteries. Not sure how that changes with the TV tuner but battery life wasn’t great.
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.
Sweet summer child. It was a thing.
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.
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
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…
if you primarily watch videos with your smartphone, couldn’t you call it a pocket tv?
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.
Or, I would reply yes, totally. It’s called a smart phone, and load up the literal television app called YouTube TV
