Dell Adamo review

The slim selection of ports and connections is one area where the Adamo falls short. Other than a headphone jack and a user-accessible SIM card slot on the right-hand side, all the other ports and connections are on the rear edge. There are two USB ports, a USB/eSATA port, and an Ethernet jack, plus a DisplayPort video output.

The lack of an SD card slot is particularly annoying, and there's no internal optical drive. Dell offers external models, though: a DVD burner adds £100 to the price, and a Blu-ray read-only drive is £190.

While our review unit included a 1.2GHz Intel Core 2 Duo U9300, 2GB of RAM and a 128GB SSD hard drive, a more expensive configuration with a 1.4GHz SU9400 and 4GB of RAM is also available. We generally suggest 4GB of RAM for use with Windows Vista.

Performance
The dual-core Intel ultra-low-voltage processor makes a huge difference compared to the Intel Atom, AMD Athlon Neo and Via Nano CPUs we've spent most of our time with lately, and the Adamo handles multitasking chores much more like a mainstream system. The tiny, low-power chips that allow the Adamo to be so slim are expensive, however, which is why you don't find them in netbooks, and why a basic Core 2 Duo 13-inch laptop such as the HP Pavilion dv3510nr, can outperform the Adamo.

While it's not intended to be a speed demon, the Adamo works well, displaying no slowdown or stuttering during normal usage, such as Web surfing, working on office documents and media playback.

One area we'd expect a high-end system like the Adamo to excel in is battery life. It ran for 2 hours and 36 minutes in our video-playback battery-drain test, using the included battery. Our battery drain test is especially gruelling, so you can expect longer life with casual Web surfing and office use, but we had hoped for a more robust battery, especially given the efficient CPU, LED display and SSD hard drive.

Conclusion
The sleek, lightweight and thin Dell Adamo has plenty of high-end visual touches that help it to live up to its luxury billing. Its whopping price tag isn't for the faint-hearted but it offers decent performance for a low-power laptop.

Additional editing by Charles Kloet