As most of the other comments point out, pocket TV did exist and you have exposed yourself as:
- Younger than the smartphone
- Never watched a 90's movie with a security guard in it
Both wrong
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1st smartphone Galaxy Spica age 26
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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
Watch season 1 episode 8 of friends, Joey has a pocket tv to watch the football game at a funeral.
And that was mid 90s, 10 years before the hand tablets of today.
(...)a big thing like, you know, smartphones
I'm unsure what you think Netflix or YouTube TV are, but they are indeed on my smart phone, which goes in my pocket.
Cargo shorts were in style at the time, so there's that
Would this require feeding it batteries like a triggerhappy machine gunner?
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.
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.
And a carry pouch
The Turbo Express also had a TV tuner add-on.
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