How Much Storage Do You Need on a Smartphone?
Deciding how much storage space is necessary when you purchase a smartphone or tablet is a decision that can be confusing for many people.
Understanding how your device uses memory can make it easier for you to buy the right amount of storage when you make any technology purchase, but it's particularly important for Apple iPhones and iPads, but also for Android phones. Apple devices are sealed and aren't upgradeable so understanding your storage requirements for these devices is more important than for Android mobile devices, desktop, or laptop computers.
Desktop and laptop computers have larger capacity disk drives, so storage space is rarely an issue with computers. Almost all Android smartphones and tablets have a slot for a Micro-SD memory card, which is like adding a disk drive to your Android device and increases the storage capacity. So it's mostly Apple iPhone and iPads that create questions about how much storage is needed. Most people purchase an Android, iPhone or iPad with the minimum memory of 16 Gigabytes of storage capacity. An upgrade a the time of purchase to 64 Gigabytes is an additional $100, and for some users, it might be worth it. It just depends on what kind of information you need to store on your device.
The amount of storage you need depends on the types of information you store on your device. Text, images, videos, and music have different requirements for storage.
Text
A text document can have a lot of characters and still not require much storage capacity. For example, a one thousand character email would use a little over one kilobyte of storage. In addition to the text, there's additional information such as the to, from, and subject data, so it's a little larger than just the characters in the body of the content. Text information doesn't use up much storage capacity, so text messages and emails aren't a big concern. The types of files that use up more memory are videos, photos, and music. Understanding how many photos, videos, and songs you want to keep in the memory of your device will help you plan for how much storage capacity to purchase.
Photos
Photos use more storage than text. A digital photo contains lots of information about color, brightness, and other details that make up the image, and higher resolution lenses on smartphones give them the capability to take great pictures. Photos are difficult to measure, but Apple's website had information that said about 435 photos will fit in one gigabyte of memory on the iPhone 5. The iPhone 6 has a higher resolution camera, so the file size of photos will be larger. To be on the conservative side, figure you can store about 300-350 photos in one gigabyte.
Video
Video comes in standard definition and high definition. A standard definition video uses much less memory than high-definition video. 20 hours of standard-definition video will fit on the 16GB model, 40 hours on the 32GB, and 80 hours on the 64GB. For high definition videos, which is what most recent models record, figure 1GB for each hour of HD video. You can fit 10 hours on a 16GB model, 20 hours on a 32GB model, and 40 hours on a 64GB model.
Music
According to Apple, 16GB will hold 3,500 average-length songs; 32GB will hold 7,000 songs, and 64GB will hold 14,000.
eBooks
The average eBook is 1000kb. This means you could fit approximately 16,000 eBooks in 16GB, 32,000 in 32GB, and 64,000 in 64GB. That's a lot of books.
To my way of thinking
For most Android, iPhone and iPad users, the 16 Gigabyte model will be adequate. But here are the reasons why the upgrade to 64 Gigabytes would be useful:
- Your music includes hundreds of songs you want on your iPhone or iPad
- Keeping all of your thousands of photos on your iPhone or iPad
- Install and play lot of gaming apps
- Use the video camera and keep more than a dozen videos or videos that are longer than 2-3 minutes each.
One of the problems with planning for the future is that you may not know how youll end up using your technology. In that case, it's best to go with upgraded memory and expect you'll make more use of a portable device.