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 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.
I miss fm radio tuners in phones.
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…
Funnily enough the bottom of the barrel budget phones usually have an FM tuner. My 2021 Motorola has one.
if you primarily watch videos with your smartphone, couldn’t you call it a pocket tv?
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.
Or, I would reply yes, totally. It’s called a smart phone, and load up the literal television app called YouTube TV
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.
Do they?
I can watch my local TV channels from the other side of the planet. I don’t think the signal reaches that far.
With internet
Your point?
That that is the difference to me, a tv has a built in tv tuner, otherwise it is a streaming device.
So? Not sure why the difference matters. What is even the use or a tuner anymore?
Tuning into OTA broadcasts.
Would this require feeding it batteries like a triggerhappy machine gunner?
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.
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
The PSP also had that type of attachment here in Japan, but it uses the 1-seg standard that IIRC was made for phones and still exists
The Turbo Express also had a TV tuner add-on.
Don’t forget the $800 30mph electric skateboards!
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But it’s only ever been niche. Or gimmick is probably more appropriate
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.
So really its:
Because of primitive battery technology, ubiquitous pocket TVs were never a thing.
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Sweet summer child. It was a thing.
And cars killed horses. Sometimes literally.
A smartphone is a pocket TV.
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”
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
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I am old enough to remember portable tvs.
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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 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.
If we’re gonna rep tech YouTubers, I am honor bound to mention Technology Connections.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to buy 2 of something.
Love Technology Connections. I learned way too much about pinball machines thanks to thay guy.
why would you want only pocket tv when you already got pocket everything?
same reason
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.
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.
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.
