But they were never mass market in the same way. Walk on to the tube today and 70% will have their noses buried in an iPhone (or less often, a 'droid). That wasn't the case with either PDA's or pocket TV's. Possibly with walkmans/iPods.
And do books count as well? Not really devices, but just as absorbing, for some of us. I don't really understand why we think about electronic devices differently from every other human invention.
A year or two ago, I had a short train commute (Loughborough to Leicester and back, on one of the main routes to London) on a daily basis and saw far more people immersed in books than in their phones -- I suspect it was a bit early in the day for the younger folk, though.
In fact, it was more common to see business people using laptops than books and phones combined.
