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What is Hardware?
What is Hardware?
According to the Oxford English dictionary, Hardware is:
"The machines, wiring, and other physical components of a computer or other electronic system."
Put simply, if you can touch it, and it uses electricity, it is probably hardware.
So that means your phone could be described as hardware.
What other bits of hardware can you name?
What other bits of hardware can you name?
Make a list of all the bits of hardware you can think of - think of things like a computer that are made up of lots of different bits of hardware - are there smaller parts you can list rather than just "computer"?
Try to list at least 10 different bits of hardware, you might have used at school, home or elsewhere - a museum maybe?
It's what's inside that counts!
It's what's inside that counts!
Your smart phone is made up of lots of different components that affect how well it performs.
If you were in charge of buying yourself a new phone, and you wanted to get the best phone for your money, you would need to understand how each bit of hardware affects the phone.
What's important in a phone?
What's important in a phone?
Imagine if all iPhones exploded, Apple went out of business and you now needed to look for a new phone.
What features would you want your new phone to have?
Which features would be must-haves, and which would be nice to have but not essential for you?
Make a list of these features.
Storage
Storage
There are two main types of storage when talking about phones:
The amount of storage on the actual phone itself. Otherwise known as "Local Storage"
The amount of storage available to be stored for you by companies. Otherwise known as "Cloud Storage"
Local storage is used for things like all of your apps, text messages, contacts and some photos and videos.
Cloud storage allows you to backup your photo and videos somewhere else, so that they do not take up storage on your phone. iPhones normally come with iCloud, which is Apple's cloud storage service. Google has Google Drive, Microsoft has OneDrive and there are also other services such as Dropbox, OneDrive, iDrive, pCloud and many more.
Buying a phone with lots of local storage can mean having to pay a lot more money - so it is important to have a think about what you could back up to the cloud, how much space you would need for your apps and whether paying an extra £300 for 128Gb rather than 64Gb is going to be worth the money.
RAM
RAM
RAM stands for Random Access Memory, and much like your brain has a working memory, this is the working memory of your phone or computer. Any app that you launch has to be loaded from your phone's local storage into RAM before the processor can run the app's code. Put very simply, the more RAM your phone has, the more apps you can have open at once without your phone slowing down.
Think back, have you ever noticed your phone running slowly and then had to close some apps down? This is the reason why closing apps helps your phone run faster.
Megapixels
Megapixels
Don't be fooled by the marketing! "More" isn't always "More" when it comes to Megapixels. Firstly, lets define what a Megapixel actually is.
A pixel is the smallest part of a digital image. It is just a square that is a single colour. You can't get anything smaller than a pixel. If you have an image that has 100 pixels in it, it won't have much detail. Take the image on the left for example, you can see all of the individual square pixels that make up the image. By counting the squares, you will find that this image is 12px tall by 14px across. 12 x 14 gives us 168. So there are 168 pixels in this image, and you can see that it is very basic.
If you have an image that has one million pixels in it, for example an image that it 1000px wide by 1000px tall, we would say that is a Megapixel. A Megapixel is simply a million pixels. And thus if you had an image that was 5000px by 5000px, you would have 5 million pixels, or 5 Megapixels.
This image of two puppies on the right has a lot more pixels in it than the image above - in fact the pixels are so small in this image that our eyes can't even see the little square dots of colour.
Phone cameras are often judged by how many Megapixels they can capture. If your phone has a 10 Megapixel camera, that means every photo you take will be made of 10 million pixels, which will allow lots of room for detail.
Now lets imagine you smother this phone's camera in peanut butter. The images you take will still have 10 million pixels in them, but the picture will look rubbish. Just because you have a lot of pixels doesn't necessarily mean you will get good images, and the lens on the camera has an equal impact on the photos.
This is why professional photographers spend THOUSANDS of pounds on lenses for their cameras, because it is not just the pixels that matter, it is the lens too!
Big Brain Time
Big Brain Time
The "Central Processing Unit" (CPU) is the brain of your phone / computer, and is responsible for running every line of code that every app is made up of.
Apps are made up of thousands upon thousands of lines of code each, and so your processor has a tough job on its hands.
Luckily for you, modern day processors can run instructions at a rate of a couple of BILLION each second. Which, lets face it, is just utter witchcraft at this point.
To give you a sense of scale for just how big a BILLION is, think about the following:
A million seconds is 11.5 days
A billion seconds is 31.7 YEARS!
That's quite a difference!
So how do you know how many instructions your processor can run per second?
Each processor is rated by how many Gigahertz (GHz) it runs at. This is know as its "Clockspeed". Hertz is a measure of how many times something runs per second. 1 Hertz is once per second. 2 Hertz is twice per second. 3 Gigahertz is 3 billion times per second.
As you can see, the processor on the left is 3.70GHz.
Processors also have something called "cores". The cores are where instructions can be run. Each core will run at the advertised speed, so in actual fact, if the processor on the left had two cores, it would be able to run 7.4 billion instructions per second, because it would have two cores both running at 3.7 billion per second. 3.7 x 2 = 7.4.
So the more cores your processor has, the more instructions your processor can run, which means it will run faster.
One downside to a high Clockspeed is the higher it gets, the hotter the processor gets and hence the hotter your phone gets.
Quick Q
Quick Q
The processor pictured above is actually a very high end computer processer, and has a whopping 10 cores!
How many instructions per second will it be able to run?
Activity
Activity
You have been given £500 (Hypothetically unfortunately...) to spend on a new phone. iPhones do not exist in this scenario.
You must search the internet, knowing what you now know about the different components of mobile phones, for what you think would be the best phone you could buy for £500. Remember to think about the things that are important to you that you listed at the start too.
Please complete the accompanying document when doing so. This should be posted to Google Classroom. If you are not a student of mine, please take a copy of the document below.
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