FIRST LOOK: Dell Adamo – is this the world’s sexiest laptop?

Take a good, long and close look. This isn’t your father’s Dell. In fact, the Adamo is not like any Dell you’ve ever seen before.
The 13.4 inch Adamo – which we first glimpsed in the briefest of ‘sneak peak’ teases at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas – is the company’s new flagship notebook with an emphasis on premium design, precision construction and fashionista appeal.
Available in Australia on March 26th, with two models priced at $3,699 and $4,299, the Adamo also has the MacBook Air in its sights. This isn’t just about two notebooks going head to head (although we’ve already done just that – click here to see more) but giving Dell a place at the ‘high tech, high touch’ table.

Few notebook vendors can seriously go up against Apple in the style stakes, where customers form an emotional attachment to products and their parent brands, and where there’s a far fatter profit margin than in the mid-market and netbook segments.

While the global financial meltdown and the boom in low-cost netbooks indicates this is not the ideal time to enter the laptop luxe market, the evolution of any notebook offering – let alone one which is such a radical departure from Dell’s playbook – can be measured in years rather than the months. Likewise for the future lifespan of the product line.

Indeed, this 13.4 inch notebook is  just the first in Dell’s new Adamo family, which takes a premium position above the performance-oriented XPS and mainstream consumer-friendly Studio lines.



Adamo (which is pronounced “A-dahm-o” rather than “Adamo-o” – fans of Battlestar Galactica already have a head start here) comes from the Latin “to fall in love with”, said Michael Tatelman, Dell’s veep of consumer sales and marketing. “It started off as a project code name, and then we fell in love with it too”.

So what’s the skinny on what Dell claims to be the world’s skinniest laptop? First up, that claim claim is true – depending on how you look at things. The Adamo has a profile of 1.64 cm, which is less than the 1.94 cm tail-end of the MacBook Air but not the Air’s wafer-thin 0.4 cm leading edge.
Dell has built the Adamo around a laser-cut aluminium chassis, although it’s not the full ‘unibody’ shell treatment of the latest MacBooks. But the construction goes farther than any Windows laptop has ever done, as does the design and attention to detail.

The look of Adamo is strikingly elegant yet restrained and almost minimalist. The clean sharp lines seem right out of the latest European studio, although Adamo was conceived and crafted at Dell’s in-house design centre in Austin, Texas.


Laser-etched patterns on the anodised aluminium lid, individually machined squared ventilation holes dotting the rear, a backlit keyboard with large scalloped keys – and not a single sticker or decal in sight.

No ‘tramp stamp’ stickers bearing the Windows or Intel logos detract from the sleek lines of the top deck, nor will you find on the Adamo’s underside that ever-present collection of serial number tags, certification stickers and the Windows OEM licence label. The Dell, Microsoft and Intel logos are faintly etched into Adamo’s aluminium underbelly while the mandatory Windows Certificate of Authenticity sticker is hidden behind a slim magnetic plate.

Dell has also held back on the LED lightshow, decking out the Adamo out with the bare minimum of lights (such as a strip of touch-sensitive media controls, the Caps Lock indicator and Power).

Even the product packaging and accessories are geared towards the style-savvy. Gone is that big cardboard box, now replaced by an attractive clear plastic box.


There are other conceits to Adamo’s elegant design, such as arraying all but the headphone port and SIM card slot (for the optional integrated 3G modem) along the rear panel. That said, we doubt these ports would have fitted anywhere else unless Dell added an extra few millimetres to Adamo’s girth, which would of course have removed bragging rights to this being the “world’s thinnest laptop”.

And there are ports a’plenty, to overcome one of the major criticisms levelled at the MacBook Air. The Adamo has three USB 2.0 ports, one of which doubles an an eSATA port; Gigabit Ethernet, to complement the fast 802.11n wireless; plus a DisplayPort socket for video output.



Both the $3,699 and $4,299 models run off Intel’s small form factor ultra-low voltage Core 2 Duo SU processors – respectively, the 1.2GHz SU9300 and the 1.4GHz SU9400 (in turn, those processors are partnered with 2MB and 4GB of RAM).

These are Intel’s lowest power Core 2 chips, drawing a maximum 10 watts against the peak 17 watt overhead of the SL series which power the MacBook Air.

The rationale behind the slower chips is to keep Adamo running cool and quiet while squeezing a little extra battery life out of the six-cell Lithium Polymer battery pack – which Dell rates as good for up to five hours, although it should be noted the battery pack can’t be removed by the end user.

(This is another similarity to the MacBook Air, as well as the 17 inch MacBook Pro, and it’s a trend we expect to see more of as super-slim notebooks move into vogue. Ditto for the lack of access to the memory slots and storage bay – lush laptops like the Adamo aren’t intended for the screwdriver set.)

The catch is that the Adamo’s performance will never be described as more than nimble because the SU chips are matched to a 3MB cache and 800MHz front size bus. Put the Adamo up against the MacBook Air’s 1.6GHz and 1.8GHz powerplants, both of which pack 6MB of cache running through a 1066MHz pipeline, and the difference will be plenty noticeable.

That said, no-one expects Adamo customers to be doing anything more that an average mix of Web and email, running Office, playing music and watching downloaded videos – and for that, even the SL is well up to the task.


Both Adamo models come with a 128GB solid state drive – there’s no option to trade down to a cheaper hard disk drive. Nor is there an optical drive, given the Adamo’s waif-like profile. A USB DVD burner (decked out in matching trim to the Adamo) is one of many options, and is bundled into the $4,299 package.

So too is the inbuilt 3G modem, which is rated to 7.2Mbps on the 2100MHz 3G and 850MHz Next G bands (although not 900MHz, which Optus and Vodafone are using for their national mobile broadband network extensions). It also packs a GPS receiver.

But in news that’s sure to please the road warrior, Dell won’t force buyers of the $4,299 Adamo to sign up to any particular service provider. While the modem is certified for Vodafone and the Adamo includes a Vodafone SIM card, the card’s not activated. You can choose your carrier and your plan.

If you’ve already got a mobile broadband plan you can slip the SIM card out of your 3G USB modem and into the concealed SIM slot on the right side of the Adamo. Load up your connection software and you’re good to go.

Common to both the $3,699 and $4,299 models is the 13.4 inch panel, covered by a single sheet of high-gloss edge to edge glass. The panel runs at 1366 x 768 to provide a 720p HD picture, with Display Port output to an external screen.

For more on Adamo, including signing up for one of the first laptops off the luxury yacht, you’ll have to wade through the oh-so-chic Adamo By Dell Web site.

And now, a taste of what's in store when Dell launches its Adamo advertising assault at the end of this month... don't say we didn't warn you!