The best laptops, desktops, and Windows tablets of IFA 2013 (pictures)

Even more so than CES or Computex, we look to the annual IFA show to present some really interesting new PCs, largely because it's the unofficial kickoff to the all-important holiday product season. This year, we're seeing a steady stream of hybrid devices that serve double duty, sometimes as both laptops and tablets, or else as all-in-one desktops and living-room tabletop PCs. There are also a handful of standard laptops as well, but the most interesting ones offer extras such as ultrahigh-res displays.

Read our full IFA coverage here.

The Flip attacks the hybrid engineering challenge by adding a hinge to the center of the upper lid, forming a horizontal line from left to right. The lid folds back along that line, allowing the screen to tilt back. First, it flips back to form a kiosk mode, with the screen pointing out from the back of the system (away from the keyboard and touch pad). Then the lid can be pushed shut to form a slate-style tablet, and unlike with the Yoga, the keyboard is on the inside. Read our impressions here.

A standalone superthin Windows 8 tablet that connects to a flat keyboard, the Vaio Tap 11 is something between a slate and a full hybrid. The two parts clip together via magnets for a reasonably secure closed unit to carry, and when separated, the tablet half sits up on a built-in kickstand. It's the thinnest Windows 8 tablet you can get with a full Intel Core i-series CPU. Read our impressions here.

How do you top the much-loved original? In the case of the just-announced Yoga 2 Pro, the star of the show is an ultrahigh-res 13.3-inch display, with a native resolution of 3,200x1,800 pixels. That puts the Yoga 2 in similar territory to the Toshiba Kirabook, Retina MacBook Pro, Chromebook Pixel, Samsung Ativ Book 9 Plus, and a handful of others. Read our impressions here.

Lenovo has a new take on the Yoga that should make a lot of people very happy. This new ThinkPad-branded model has a seriously engineered keyboard and chassis design that pulls the keys into the body as you fold it over backward into tablet mode. Read our impressions here.

The new HP Envy Recline 23- and 27-inch all-in-one PCs have a multiangle hinged metal armature that allows a lot of flexibility, even down to a nearly flat mode. Unlike tabletop PCs that fully detach and have their own internal batteries, these are larger, heavier full PCs meant to stay on a table, weighing 26.7 and 32.1 pounds, respectively. Read our impressions here.

There's room in the marketplace for an 8-inch Windows tablet, but we haven't seen a credible candidate up until now. The $329 Encore has a 1,280x800-pixel IPS multitouch display, and inside, it has one of Intel's upcoming new Bay Trail Atom processors, which may improve performance over current Atom models, plus 32GB of internal storage, and a microSD slot for adding up to an additional 32GB of storage. Read our impressions here.

There's no question that this is a premium machine. The entire top of the laptop has been covered in Gorilla Glass 3 -- a special tempered glass that's highly resistant to scratches -- and the 13.3-inch display can be configured to have a regular full-HD panel, or be boosted to a whopping 2,560x1,440 pixels (similar to the Lenovo Yoga 2, Toshiba Kirabook, and others). Read our impressions here.