Hands on with the Dell Adamo
If I were Apple, I'd be a little flattered and maybe a little worried by Dell's new ultrathin laptop
Follow @infoworldI'm a big fan of what Apple is doing with the 13.4-inch Adamo laptop. Oh, wait, did I say that out loud?
Dell has been taking a couple pages from the Apple playbook as of late. A cryptic ad surfaced for this mystery machine around CES time, with no real details. A sexy design. A high price....and the name? Adamo? Is that a slick little joke about he who took a bite out of an apple?
This particular bite resembles a cross between the Apple MacBook Air and the HP Voodoo Envy 133 .
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Dell's spokespeople claim that the Adamo is the thinnest laptop around (0.65 inch thick, to be specific). Well, where it stands in that respect is a little up to debate depending on which part of the Air you measure, but I can tell you that the Adamo is the slimmest machine with an optical drive. Score some points for Dell.
The svelte-but-boxy Adamo comes in two colors, Pearl and Onyx -- the latter made me do a double-take for a sec, since it looks eerily similar to the Envy 133. The difference is that this system's unibody design doesn't smudge up as much in your hands. The brushed-metal case of the Adamo also feels way more substantial than the Voodoo Envy 133's chassis: I could use the Envy 133 for a couple minutes, and it would look like a crime scene with all my scuffs and fingerprints. And if I was eating Cheetos at the time -- fuhgeddaboutit.
The 1,386-by-768-pixel display looks to go toe-to-toe with the likes of the Air. With a fairly sharp screen and edge-to-edge glass, it looked firmly put together. Also lining the frame are two USB 2.0 ports, a hybrid USB and eSATA port, an ethernet jack, a headphone jack, and a DisplayPort output. The unit also has integrated Bluetooth 2.1 and 802.11n wireless support. Instead of a dedicated microphone input, a small series of dots beside the keyboard do the job; I'm not sure I'm sold on that, but I'll have to get back to you on how well it works after I've played with it some. One nifty addition: Dell has crammed a user-accessible SIM-card slot on the side (first time I've seen that in a laptop).
