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
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 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.
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.
Here, in the middle of nowhere, like a town with 1500 people was the biggest thing in 20 miles or so, we got about 10-15 channels without even having the antenna outside the house, plus surrounded by forest.
We have more OTA channels, you just have to pay for them. The free channels are in shitty SD quality (you have to pay for HD) and they are only unencrypted because the government requires it (as they are used for emergency broadcasts).
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Gimmick/niche isn’t an appropriate description for technology that was superceded by smartphones, even early ones.
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 think some of the folks in this thread might enjoy the Techmoan channel on YouTube. It’s not about pocket TVs in particular, but he does review and restore old AV tech. It’s a fun channel if you’re into retro tech.
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.
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 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…
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