How many contacts can iPhone hold?

well, the contacts database is an SQLite-Database, and the SQLite documentation says this:

The default setting for SQLITE MAXCOLUMN is 2000. You can change it at compile time to values as large as 32676. You might be able to redefine this value to be as large as billions, though nobody has ever tried doing that so we do not know if it will work.

so the limit lies somwhere between 2000 and 32676 probably. I'd guess apple chose the maximum to prevent any problems.

regards

Don't confuse "columns" with "rows". Assuming a flat file structure (non relational DB), 2000 columns only references 2000 "fields" within any given record (aka row). I doubt there's a cap on records within the SQL db. The only cap would be in how big you define what a "contact" is.

The more data (columns containing data) in a record, i.e. columns = phone, email, street address, fax, etc. etc. the more memory that one record/contact will consume.

The other variable would be how much memory do you have free.

Finally, it is possible (not knowing how the system runs) that there would be some performance issues if you had an iPhone dedicated only to storing contact info (no music, no videos, etc.), and it was maxed out.

If you assume that a standard contact entry had around 100 bytes of data (each byte being a character in the alphabet, plus a little overhead), and you had 7Gb of storage free, that would translate to a theoretical storage capacity of 70 million entries.

Call me a nerd! 😉

Well, I'm not sure if there is a maximum listed anywhere, but I have a little over 1000 and it is working fine. I've read a post about a girl that has around 4000, but she was having a slow down in applications. No one is sure if that is what caused it.

Hope this helps you.

My friend claims 20k! I haven't verified this 'cause I don't care, but that's what he says...

that's a lot of numbers.