Because of smartphones, pocket TVs were never a thing.

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

1st smartphone Galaxy Spica age 26

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
- 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.
- 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.
- 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

Sweet summer child. It was a thing.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Watchman

Instead now we have giant smartphones mounted to the wall

it even runs android

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

I am old enough to remember portable tvs.

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 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.

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.

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.

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
- 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.

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.

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"

why would you want only pocket tv when you already got pocket everything?

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.

I had one that had the same form factor as a gameboy. It was black, the screen had a resolution so tiny you could not really make anything out, and it was almost impossible to get a stable signal. But I loved it when I was 12 years old, because I was only allowed to watch tv for an hour every day, and nobody knew I had that tiny TV which I bought from the money I made delivering flowers. I still have it in a box somewhere.

Edit: this

That is really cool

I mean... They were a thing before smartphones.

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.

Don't forget the $800 30mph electric skateboards!

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.

And tablets killed those digital picture frames. Because why have those when you can just prop a tablet down and have it on slideshow mode.

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.
- $150 is cheap to you? Um, okay then...
Indeed

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

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.