The original un-verified quote attributed to Bill Gates in the 80s was regarding 640KB of RAM in PCs so it’s with some hesitation I say 16GB of storage ought to be enough for any tablet computer.
A lot of us use multiple devices and keeping copies of our files on each one is just nuts. A single personal ‘library’ we can access from anywhere on any device is surely the way forward. Local storage should only really be needed for keeping off-line copies for what we actually need off-line and even then these should be automatically sync’d to a single central on-line copy to make sure we have the most up-to-date versions on all devices where possible.
Cloud storage is with us already with many vendors offering 5GB for free and as much as you want for a price. Network Attached Storage (NAS) has been in business for decades and many techies have had it in their homes just as long.
I predict that in 5 years time most wireless routers will have a built in hard drive which we’ll use as our own ‘private cloud’. We’d have fast cloud storage from within our own homes and with such tight integration with the router we can ‘dial in’ to our private cloud from anywhere we have internet. And our router could back-up everything to conventional cloud for us.
If you want to spend some money NAS-routers are available today but I can see this being huge if we can get the price point to commodity equipment level.
Putting my money where my mouth is I recently bought a Google Nexus 10. 16GB storage? No SD card slot? No worries.
Footnote: for those of you too young to remember floppy disks, 640KB is approximately nothing. To two decimal places it’s 0.00GB