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 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
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Gimmick/niche isn’t an appropriate description for technology that was superceded by smartphones, even early ones.