Storage and data?
WHAT’S THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN...
QDaft question, but what’s the difference between storage and data? A friend said I’d find an iphone easier to use than a computer, but I’m already confused. When I went to a shop for help, a young man baffled me, saying the iphone had this much storage for apps and photos and that much data for videos and music. Why are there different electronics for these things? Elizabeth Turner
AFirst, let’s deal with your impression that apps, photos, videos and music use different electronics. They don’t. All these things are made up of digital ones and zeros, and those ones and zeroes are ‘data’. However, your shop lad was probably trying to explain the different ways electronic information is handled.
Specifically, apps are installed on to the phone. That means their data occupies some of the phone’s own internal storage (comprising physical memory chips). Similarly, when you take photos, they are – initially at least – saved to the phone’s internal storage.
If or when you delete an app or photo, that same bit of storage is freed up. An iphone with 64GB of memory will at any one time be able to store dozens of apps, and hundreds or even thousands of photos. The 64GB storage never changes, and represents the total capacity – but it could be more or less full at any time, like a bathtub containing water.
Videos and music are also nothing more than digital ones and zeros, and they can also be saved to the phone’s internal storage. However, many people nowadays choose instead to ‘stream’ rather than store these media. In this case the related data is transmitted over a mobile network, live. Data in this context, then, doesn’t occupy any of the phone’s storage.
When phone salespeople talk of data, they’re referring to an allowance that dictates how much you can stream in a month. At the risk of stretching our earlier analogy, you could think of data in this context as a shower: the tray never fills up, but there’s only so much hot water in the tank. Pricecomparison site Confused.com maintains a useful calculator for how much monthly data you might need: www.snipca.com/29202. Want to know the difference between technical terms? Email noproblem@ computeractive.co.uk