You’ve probably noticed that the cost to upgrade in storage size on a tablet seems disproportionate to the price of actual hard drives. That’s why companies like Apple, Google and Amazon have been accused of taking advantage of customers when it comes to storage charges on tablets.

READ: Apple iPad Air review

A Which? report has revealed that consumers are being given a rough deal when it comes to paying more for higher storage capacities. For example, the Apple iPad Air starts at £399 for 16GB, but you have to pay £80 to double this to 32GB. And memory card slots are becoming less common, as a means to make profits easier.

READ: Amazon Kindle Fire HDX review

The memory upgrade, claims Which?, costs Apple only £6 but has a mark-up of 1267 per cent.

Ben Miles, from PC maker Chillblast, says 16GB of Flash memory is "mind-numbingly cheap now".  He adds: "As a general rule, for manufacturers like ourselves, Flash costs less than 40p per GB, so for companies to charge so much for an extra 16GB seems scandalous."

Google and Amazon aren’t quite as bad. They charge £70 and £40 for the same memory upgrade on the Nexus 10 and Kindle Fire HDX. But these are still large mark-ups.

The other issue here is that users often buy a device expecting the advertised amount of space, only to find half of that is taken up by the operating system, as in the case of the Samsung Galaxy S4 with 16GB.

But with internet cloud storage now an option you could take advantage of that for savings. But then you need permanent access to it and have to pay more for a data connected device rather than Wi-Fi only. Either way it’s a tough pill to swallow but one that seems to be unavoidable right now.