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Mobile phones and the internet.
mobile phones are easy, in 50s some of people would be familiar with (ww2 era) military radios that could transmit voice, just explain that you don't need to carry entire backpack of radio equipment, everything fits in this small device
There was also Dick Tracy and his 2-way wrist radio.
oof ouchie
have you ever seen a RF burn?
I don't think that was a feature of Dick Tracy's wrist radio.
range 1500km, this is completely doable on standard amateur radio equipment, you just need few hundred watts of power
this is what happens when you're too close to an antenna handling power like that (lifted from reddit):
Ok... what does that have to do with a fictional wrist radio in a comic strip?
I believe @skillissuer is pointing out that in order to broadcast the 1500km that Dick Tracy's watch was said to have would require a ton of power. That power would make it dangerous to have on your wrist. That's just what I pieced together through context though.
Ah, that does make sense. It was very unclear to me.
yeah sorry if it was unclear. this problem is avoided by talking to some other station, usually GSM tower or satellite. when you don't have this luxury, you need high power, large antenna array or you get lower range
and also we managed to reduce power use few thousand times, and we use frequencies some 1000x higher than these old radios, up to 15000x if we insist
Mobile phones as phones—yes, maybe that's easy. But that we don't actually use them to TALK to people would be weird.
explain that as portable fax machines. google search or any social media would be a complete mystery however