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

  • Guntrigger@sopuli.xyz
    47·
    2 months ago

    As most of the other comments point out, pocket TV did exist and you have exposed yourself as:

    1. Younger than the smartphone
    2. Never watched a 90’s movie with a security guard in it
    • BeatTakeshi@lemmy.worldOP
      3·
      2 months ago

      Both wrong

      1. 1st smartphone Galaxy Spica age 26

      2. 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

  • Krafty Kactus@sopuli.xyzEnglish
    18·
    2 months ago

    I mean they literally are, you can watch literally any tv show or movie on them so I don’t see a difference.

    • Carighan Maconar@lemmy.world
      10·
      2 months ago

      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!

    • bitchkat@lemmy.worldEnglish
      3·
      2 months ago

      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.

      • brygphilomena@lemmy.world
        2·
        2 months ago

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        Gimmick/niche isn’t an appropriate description for technology that was superceded by smartphones, even early ones.

  • dual_sport_dork@lemmy.world
    11·
    2 months ago

    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.

  • Boozilla@lemmy.worldEnglish
    9·
    2 months ago

    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.

    • BeatTakeshi@lemmy.worldOP
      2·
      2 months ago

      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

    • BeatTakeshi@lemmy.worldOP
      2·
      2 months ago

      How do you call yours though?

      A smartphone is ALSO a pocket TV is what you mean. It’s not the other way round is what I mean.

      “The iTV 6 Pro can now make phone calls”

  • originalucifer@moist.catsweat.com
    5·
    2 months ago

    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.

  • SauceBossSmokin@lemmy.world
    2·
    2 months ago

    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.

  • Today@lemmy.world
    1·
    2 months ago

    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.