Poké-Mobile Devices

The current era that we live in is an era of gadgets and mobile devices. I have a few of them, and I imagine that most of the readers of my blog and my friends, Pokémon or otherwise, do too. But before the mobile devices of today really became popular, the Pokémon games had already featured a host of their own "mobile devices", some of which have similar capabilities to our current mobile devices. All these devices are unique in their own ways in serving the needs of Trainers.

Perhaps the most popular mobile device is the Pokédex, which has been present in all generations in varying incarnations. The core function of this device, however, has stayed consistent: to record sightings and information on Pokémon found in the regions featured. Pokémon areas, sounds (cries), biological details, and descriptive observations are still the most emblematic details of all Pokémon, in spite of all the changes that have occurred, from the basic index of the first generation all the way to the Rotom-powered Pokédex of the seventh generation. It's a trend that other devices have had a hard time following.

In the second-generation games featuring Johto, there was the PokéGear. The device is similar to feature phones of old and fulfills much of the same functions. Its map function replaces the Town Map of the previous generation, while its radio function lets Trainers obtain interesting information and the call function lets them "interact" or "communicate" with other characters, who may signal time-based events. The map and call functions were carried over to the PokéNav in the third generation games featuring Hoenn, with the addition of a Pokémon contest statistic viewer, though in the remakes this function was moved to the main statistic viewer and supplanted by a Pokémon-hunting function as well as a function to access the interactive systems previously introduced in XY.

The fourth-generation games in Sinnoh saw the introduction of the Pokétch, which looks a lot and in fact functions like the smart watches of today. The device not only includes a clock for telling the current time, but also mini-apps such as a pedometer and calculator, which may occasionally be handy for in-game progress. The last of the main series devices is the C-Gear for Unova, which was primarily used for communication, after which point the functions of previous devices were replaced with "systems" starting in the sixth generation rather than devices proper, save for the seventh-generation Rotom Dex.

As unique as these mobile devices are, their resemblance and usage in respect to our mobile devices are uncanny and in a way could be seen as a progenitor of our mobile devices, as with the Pokétch and smart watches. What is sure is that all these devices are advanced in what they can do considering the world of Pokémon, just like ours are for use in our world. In the times to come, perhaps our devices and the otherworldly devices of Pokémon will continue to take pages from each other and become even more advanced than they are today. It's certainly something to look forward to.