How Many Songs Can the Apple iPhone 3G Hold?

Common Question: “I am thinking about buying an iPhone in the near future, but I was wondering how many songs it can hold. What is the storage capacity of the Apple iPhone 3G model?” Here’s your answer:

It might hold 1,000 songs, or it might hold closer to 4,000. It depends on three things — (1) the length of the songs, (2) the amount of other “stuff” you have stored on your phone, and (3) the iPhone model you choose.

The Length of Songs

Every song is a different length, so they take up different amounts of space in your phone’s memory. The last part of Beethoven’s 9th Symphony could be purchased as one song, but it’s something like 15 minutes long (3 x longer than the average song). Most people use three minutes as an average song length. Using  that standard, I would estimate that your iPhone could hold anywhere from 1,000 – 4,000 songs, depending on the model you choose and the amount of other media (apps, videos) you have stored.

Other iPhone Apps and Media

It also depends on what else you have stored on the phone. Do you have a lot of apps and videos and such? If so, you won’t be able to get as many songs on the iPhone 3G, because you’ll be eating up storage space with those other things.

With that being said, the iPhone 3G has an 8-gigabyte (8GB) flash drive, so there’s plenty of storage space for songs and other items. But like any electronic device, that space is limited. Furthermore, if you ever push the limits by downloading a huge library of songs, you will sacrifice some performance. The more memory you use for storage, the less that will be available for running applications.

By the way, “3G” means third generation. It does not mean 3 gigabytes / GB. This is something that confuses a lot of people, so I wanted to point it out. The Apple iPhone 3G (third generation model) actually has 8GB (gigabytes) of memory space. Make sense?

The 3G vs. the 3GS

To make this question even harder to answer, Apple recently released the iPhone 3GS (recent at the time this article was published anyway). The newer model is said to be twice as fast as the earlier iPhone 3G model. You can buy the new model with either a 16GB or 32GB flash drive, compared to the 8GB drive in the regular 3G model. This means the newer model (3GS) can hold a lot more songs than the earlier model.