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
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 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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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…
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.
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
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