Nowadays just about 70% of the population of the United States uses a smartphone. To put that into perspec­tive, that’s hundreds of millions of mobile users per day, just from the U.S. It is being a commonality, as elementary school children to senior citizens can be seen carrying these handy devices with them as they go about their days. The advantages are obvious; mainly that it has made the world a smaller place, allowing communication to become in­stantaneous and comfortable.

However there is one drawback in smartphones: the storage capac­ity. Many smart phones have 64GB or less storage, which is minimized even further by installation and soft­ware updates. A great alternative is uploading your information to on­line cloud servers, but those are only accessible by Wi-Fi. There is also the debate over privacy; many people do not feel comfortable storing their personal information, which includes pictures, videos, and messages, to the cloud. That is why at Rice Uni­versity, James Tour and his team of chemists are trying to create storage for the smartphones using RRAMs (resistive random-access memory), which incorporates silicon oxide ? one of the most abundant resources on Earth.

The key factor in the research is the availability trait, as the RRAMs can be made at room temperature and lower voltages than earlier, similar versions. Because the RRAMs are made with silicon glass transparency is a realistic possibility, which makes it easier to store more memory in the phone. If all is well, then the RRAMs will create a phone with a terabyte of memory-about 1,000 gigabytes of memory. To put that into perspective, even a tera­byte of memory for a desktop computer or laptop is considered to be a lot of memory. Seeing how every year there are more advances in the mobile tech­nology industry, it is not a stretch to say that this type of improvement is not only realistic, but also plausible.