Hybrid articles

The full metal body of the Surface 3 makes it one of the best designed, most attractive Windows tablets on the market. Throw in great features like the three-position kickstand, the hidden microSD card slot, the full-sized USB port, the 3:2 display, and Microsoft has nailed the design of this tablet.

The Asus Transformer Book T100 is a full Windows 8.1 entry-level 10-inch tablet, sporting Intel 'Bay Trail' internals, and a keyboard dock all for under $500. The Transformer line of products has typically been quite solid, so it'll be interesting to see how this Windows convertible hybrid fares and if the T100 manages to stand out from the crowd.

The WD Black2 sports both a 120GB SSD and a 1TB HDD in a single package. Unlike other hybrid configs such as Seagate's Momentus XT which combine ample magnetic storage with a little NAND, the Black2 crams both technologies into one drive too, but it simply does what desktop users have been doing for years by making the flash portion a primary boot drive with the disk serving as bulk storage.

Microsoft's answer to the changing computing landscape is Windows 8, an operating system that attempts to balance the demands of traditional productivity-oriented desktops with the mobility of, well, mobile devices.

Hybrids thus appear to be the optimal home for Windows 8 as both aspects of the OS are in use and get to shine as they were designed to. That brings us to the Acer Iconia W510 hybrid tablet, which can be essentially converted into a full-fledged PC with its keyboard dock - no Windows RT here, folks.