Google's sold an awful lot of 16GB Nexus 7 tablets, and with pretty good reason; having had time to properly assess the budget tablet, it really is a bit of a bargain, especially in its 16GB variant. The 8GB version? Slightly less so, if only because the gap between 8GB and 16GB isn't that great and there's no easy way (outside of rooting the tablet and messing around with fiddly USB cables) to add more storage.

So many tablets, in fact, that the Nexus 7 16GB shifted from being able to be ordered to being "Ships soon (1-2 weeks)" earlier in the week, although looking at it right now, Google reckons it's found a few more, and it can be straight up ordered. But why did Google run out of the 16GB model when it appears to be a case of the classic up sell strategy, getting consumers to spend a bit more on what appears to be a bargain? Bargains are relative -- there's no way Google's paying an extra $50 for that extra 8GB of storage -- but that's what you'd think Google would figure.

Except that it didn't. According to The Guardian, Google's plan was for consumers to snap up the cheaper 8GB Nexus 7 and access lots of content via the cloud. An interesting strategy, and one that was largely wrong as it turned out. There's a pretty obvious case here of somebody making an assumption -- that everyone has lots of available Wi-Fi access wherever they might be -- that simply isn't the case.

I suppose if you did spend the majority of your tablet time, whether that's at work or at home or whatever in a permanent Wi-Fi cloud, and you stored all your media online it might make sense. But everyone travels at some point, and that's where limited storage really stings -- and why the 16GB Nexus 7 was always the better deal.