Last week in Vienna we had a chance to see a few Intel Core M and Bay Trail based notebooks, detachables and convertibles and one machine really caught our eye.

At the moment you can buy the Lenovo Yoga 3 powered by the Core M-5Y70, but this convertible notebook will burn a €1600 hole in your pocket. This is a machine with impressive specs, including 8GB RAM, 512GB SSD, 13.3-inch 3200x1800 display, but despite its 1.19kg weight we feel it is overpriced.

The Acer Aspire Switch 12 has more down to earth suggested retail price of €649, but the cheapest we could find listed was €699.

It is powered by an Intel Core M-5Y10a clocked at 800MHz, but with Turbo Core this processor can reach 2000MHz and still remains passively cooled with a 4.5W TDP. The Acer Aspire Switch 12 has a 12.5-inch 1920x1080 resolution display and packs a 4GB RAM, 128GB SSD storage as well as a microSD card slot. It supports 802.11ac wireless standard, Bluetooth 4.0 and comes with USB 3.0 and micro HDMI on the tablet, along with an additional USB 2.0 on the dock.

What makes this machine rather unique that it offers tablet, notebook and All-in-One functionality. It comes with a keyboard and a dock and of course, the machine works without them in a tablet mode. It runs Windows 8.1 and we spent too little time with the machine, but we can at least say that Windows 8.1 seemed responsive and that the build quality is good.

We have to admit that it makes an almost perfect hybrid, but the dock can't be completely detached, as you can see in the video. This might be the one Core M machines worth buying this holiday season and with passive cooling, flexible formats and reasonable price, it's quite a good catch. It should be available in a week staring at €649.