I bought a new piece of kit for my photography recently. I’d love to say it was a Nikon D800 or a Leica M9 but alas no, it was something far more useful for its price.

I’ve waited so very long to decide once and for all whether I ‘needed’ a tablet PC. I’m very lucky to have a 2010 MacBook Pro and wouldn’t be without it. That said, there have been many times when I’ve wanted portable computing in a form bigger than the iPhone.

I looked at inexpensive Android tablets and the iPad and just could not make my mind up which would be best suited to me. I didn’t want to buy an iPad in case it left my MacBook Pro mostly unused.

7 March 2011 came along and Apple announced their new iPad. Not an iPad 3 by name but 3rd generation nonetheless. I hoped there was going to be a 7- or 8-inch version at a lower price but it didn’t materialise.

So instead I bought an iPad 2.

What? Yes I know, it sounds bonkers as there’s a new iPad out but I’ll tell you why the 2 is better suited than the 3.

1) Price – the iPad is always £399 for the base model with wi-fi and £499 with wi-fi and 3G. I don’t see much point in having one unless I have 3G as I want to be able to access the Internet out of the house without having to find a wi-fi hotspot. However, paying an extra £100 for the privilege is a bit much! So, when the new iPad went on sale, the previous incarnation dropped in price to a much more respectable £429 with 3G. Psychologically, to me, it felt much more justifiable to spend £70 less for what is still an excellent bit of kit, even though a newer one is available.

2) Eyesight – my eyes are rubbish. I appreciated the difference between the display on the iPhone 3G and the iPhone 4, but I honestly don’t think my eyes are good enough for a display higher in quality than the iPad 2.

3) My MacBook Pro – I didn’t want to leave it redundant just by buying a tablet, but even more so by having a retina display iPad of approximately 3 megapixels! I do all my photo editing and sorting on my MacBook Pro. I’m certain that a 2048×1536 display is excellent, but it would have made the laptop screen look poor by comparison.

4) Niggles – the overheating, the longer charging time, the increase in app size for retina graphics: all these little things add up to potentially being irritating with the new iPad. The probably aren’t in the long run but for me there’s nothing wrong with the iPad 2 at all. I don’t regret buying it one bit. In fact my only regret is that I didn’t buy it sooner!

So now I have a portable photo viewing and editing machine that I can also play videos and music on, browse the web, use twitter and write this blog with. Perfect.

Maybe I’ll get an iPad 5 when it comes out…