Gadgetory

we live in a day and age where our electronic devices are an integral part of our everyday lives what's inside of them that makes them do everything that we need them to do I'm Joe Levi and on this episode of pocket now power user we're going to talk about another very important component Ram when talking about the memory that goes into our smartphones tablets wearables and even our computers and routers and other stuff than enable our digital life there are essentially two kinds of memory that we want to talk about there's long-term storage sometimes called non-volatile storage sometimes erroneously called ROM and then there's RAM or random access memory or just memory these two things that's all so volatile by the way these two things are really what gets us all of our data that stores it and lets us use it the CPU that we talked about last week processes it and makes that data do stuff so what is data data is information it's bits it's ones and zeros it's your usernames and passwords stored in a secure location it's your configurations it's the orientation of the icons on your home screen it's the apps that you have installed it's the information that you've created the documents that you've created the cached files it's it's a lot of stuff so don't just think when i say data i'm thinking about documents because data is ones and zeros and it's everything that you need to make your device do what you need it to do well you don't want to have to worry about losing that data when you lose your power so let's jump in the Wayback Machine and I've got an example to share with you way back in the window siiii days this predates windows mobile pocket pc and all that stuff hey the palm top pc days microsoft did something weird they had a good reason for it you see back in those days non-volatile memory non-volatile storage was relatively slow not quite as slow as a hard drive with its rotational media or maybe slower depending on who you asked but slow now for a PDA something you carry it around in your hand too slow lamb on the other hand was quite a bit faster but it's volatile when you turn the power off to it all the information in it goes away just as simple as that what you do you'd get your brand new device you charge up the battery you turn it on and start setting things up you'd put a new user names your passwords you configure it you'd start installing apps onto it and hopefully you wouldn't forget to charge it up or somehow run out of battery because if you did you had a coin cell battery as a backup that coin cell was there just to keep all of the data in RAM which remember that's all of your apps all of your data all of your configurations everything it had to keep that alive and if that coin cell went out you've got to set your device up all over again luckily that's not the world that we live in today technology has increased and improved but one thing has stayed the same running apps out of ram instead of out of long-term or non-volatile memory is a lot faster so you need a lot of RAM apps are getting bigger every day more features more resolution remember those 2k screens and 4k screens and 28.8 k screens that we're talking it ok we're not talking about those the more bits that you have the higher resolution imagery you need to support those colors and those pixels on your screens that takes up a lot more storage space takes more processing power yeah you see how it's all interconnected here basically you want as much RAM as you can have so when you go down the spec list and you're looking at all of the things on there if you see two gigabytes of RAM you're good if you're a really really power user you see three gig of Ram you're golden that's where we are today that's what you need to know about the RAM line on the spec sheet when you're considering your next smartphone or tablet if you like the information that you saw here and give the video a thumbs up and make sure that you've subscribed so that you don't miss out on the next episode of the pocket now power user don't forget to share it with your friends and for pocket now i'm joe levi i'll catch you next time