Dell Adamo: Love machine takes on the Air

dell_adamo Review

Reviewed by: Rich Trenholm

Reviewed on: 17 March 2009

It's a little late for Valentine's Day, but that hasn't stopped Dell unveiling the Adamo, a new ultra-thin laptop with a name that's Latin for 'to fall in love'.

Our US colleagues have had their hands on the new machine, and made the obvious comparison between the Adamo and the similarly svelte Apple MacBook Air. Specs-wise, Dell's new love machine packs a 1.2GHz Intel Core 2 Duo U9300, 2GB of RAM, and a 64GB SSD hard drive.

Like newer MacBooks, the Adamo is housed in a unibody chassis milled from a single piece of aluminium. It comes in brushed black onyx or white-etched pearl. The Adamo will be positioned at the centre of a new range of similarly fancy accessories, including 250GB and 500GB external hard drives, external DVD and Blu-ray drives and more.

Open the Adamo, and you'll get an eyeful of the 16:9, high-definition, 13-inch, edge-to-edge glass display. Unfortunately, it packs an integrated rather than dedicated graphics chip to handle the visuals natively, so it won't deal with 3D rendering terribly well. Still, this is designed for portability rather than power.

The Adamo certainly scores over the Air in that it has double the number of USB ports -- two. Other connections include a USB/eSATA port, DisplayPort video output and Ethernet connection, all placed on the back. On the right, there's a headphone jack and a user-accessible SIM card slot. You can connect to the cloud via Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and optional integrated mobile broadband.

Take a look at our hands-on pictures courtesy of our 'Merkin cousins, as they pit the Adamo against the MacBook Air. Forget about falling in love, let's have a fight!