enovo’s Yoga 3 Pro is so close to perfect that its shortcomings feel all the more frustrating. In terms of form and usability, this is easily my favorite new laptop design of the year. The iconic 360-degree fold-back Yoga hinge has been radically reimagined as a thin strip of watchband-like metal, allowing the body to be especially thin, while still just as flexible as previous versions for transforming into a kiosk or tablet.

It's remarkably thin and light, and feels just different enough from every other slim 13-inch laptop or hybrid to really count as a major step.

The other half of that step forward was supposed to come from Intel's new Core M CPU, , a chip designed to be a perfect fit for thin, upscale tablets and hybrids that needed just the right mix of performance, battery life and energy efficiency. The big pitch for Core M is that systems using it can run with minimal cooling, or even without fans at all, allowing them to be thinner and lighter than ever.

The Yoga 3 Pro is the first consumer PC with the Core M CPU, and at least for now, the victim ofsomeearly growing pains. As the only Core M product we've been able to fully benchmark, it's hard to say if the issues are with the CPU itself, or Lenovo's implementation of the platform.

What we're left with is performance that's good enough for everyday use, but not as robust as competing products -- and not the kind of multitasking performance one might expect from a $1,300 laptop (£1,300 in the UK and AU$2,099 in Australia). Battery life is also below what a portable system such as this needs, optimistically hitting around six hours, while most of the PCs we compared it with add at least two hours to that, and the 13-inch MacBook Air more than doubles it.

Lest this sound like an unenthusiastic take on this new hybrid, remember, there's more to judging a computer than just on-paper performance numbers. If I were simply using the Yoga 3 Pro without seeing any of those application performance or battery life numbers, I'd be very impressed. For the type of work most of us do, running a few Web browsers, streaming video and music and working on office documents, the Yoga 3 Pro felt fast enough. But advanced tasks such as gaming or HD video editing are better served by more powerful PCs.

Battery life was close to Lenovo's promised 7 hours during casual use, although even that feels skimpy by today's standards. Playing video seemed to hit the Core M, designed to throttle computing power to fit your usage, particularly hard, draining the battery in under six hours.