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
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.
A smartphone is a pocket TV.
How do you call yours though?
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
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 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Gimmick/niche isn’t an appropriate description for technology that was superceded by smartphones, even early ones.
Don’t forget the $800 30mph electric skateboards!
Sweet summer child. It was a thing.
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.
Indeed
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.
The Turbo Express also had a TV tuner add-on.
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.
Look, I tried, and failed, to come up with a joke involving bonking something on the head, but they all got too wordy.
That thing was heavy as hell, especially with all those batteries.
And a carry pouch
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.
The antenna doesn’t need power to receive the signal, unless it’s boosted, but something tells me that’s not the case here.
What might consume more power would be any kind of decoding that’s going on.
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.
Because of smartphones, they ARE a thing!
You don’t call them that is what I meant
You mean the call meant what?
Only with Internet
Before the analog blackout, some phones had both radio and TV apps. They even came with an adjustable antennae.
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!
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.
Edit: this
That is really cool
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
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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
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.
