Dell Adamo

Full review

Dell initially revealed the existence of its upscale 13-inch Adamo laptop at CES 2009, and formally announced details and ordering availability two months later. We previously had a chance to get our hands on a pre-production version of the system, and have now been able to test the finished product.

The Adamo is a departure for Dell, a company built on selling mass quantities of mainstream laptops. A high-end, ultra-thin model, it starts at around £1,650 and shares a general design sensibility with Apple's MacBook Air and the HP Voodoo Envy 133.

Design
Dell is pitching the Adamo as a 'luxury-brand notebook design for the luxury-conscious consumer' -- not the most timely of ideas, considering the current economic climate and the resultant growth in low-cost netbooks. But it's important to note that the ultra-low-voltage Intel Core 2 Duo processor used in the Adamo runs rings around those used in other recent slim laptops, such as the HP Pavilion dv2 with AMD's new Athlon Neo CPU.

Also, while you may be able to get faster components for less, the Adamo's real selling point is its design. There are no visible stickers or screws (even the usual Microsoft and Intel badges have been replaced -- the logos are etched into a panel on the underside of the system), and it includes high-end features such as a solid-state hard drive, an etched anodised aluminium chassis, and a backlit keyboard.

The end result is an enviable package that will definitely attract plenty of stares at the coffee shop or airport lounge, not just because of its sharp looks but also because, with a whopping starting price, you're unlikely to see many of them in the wild.

Built into an aluminium case with unibody construction, like the current MacBooks, the 17mm-thick Adamo is, according to Dell, the thinnest laptop in the world. It's certainly thin, but whether it's actually the thinnest depends on how you measure the Air. The tapered Air is thinner at its narrowest point, but slightly thicker at its widest point. We were surprised at how heavy the Adamo feels. At a hair under 1.8kg, it's certainly lightweight but, based on the size, we were expecting something closer to the 1.4kg Air.

The Adamo is available in both white and black versions. The back of the lid is split between etched metal and a glossy finish -- actually a 0.5mm glass inlay -- which is better for wireless reception than other materials. The white finish has a wavy pattern etched into it, while the black model has a more traditional brushed-metal look.

Opting for a subtle look on and around the keyboard tray, the Adamo has only a handful of small LED lights, for the power button, the touch-sensitive media controls and the caps lock button. The backlit keyboard itself is a big change from the typical Dell laptop keyboard, which has always had tall, tapered keys. The Adamo's keyboard borrows more from the Dell Inspiron Mini 9, with closely spaced keys, similar in style to what you might find on a MacBook or Sony Vaio, but slightly scalloped instead of flat.

Typing felt very comfortable, but the individual keys were slightly clacky and the space bar required a solid hit to register, which didn't fit with our dainty typing style. The metal touchpad worked well. Sometimes using non-traditional surfaces on a touchpad can cause uncomfortable friction and finger drag, but that's not the case here.

The 13.4-inch 16:9 LED display offers a 1,366x768-pixel native resolution and is behind a sheet of edge-to-edge glass. It's a sleek look, but the display's very susceptible to glare and reflections. The screen hinge is set back about an inch from the rear of the system, leaving what looks like a small handle when the display is open.

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