Dell Adamo: a first look

One of the most buzzed-about new notebooks of 2009 is Dell's Adamo, a high-end, ultra-thin 13in. model that starts £1,649 and shares a design sensibility with the MacBook Air and HP's Voodoo Envy 133.

After teasing the system at CES 2009, Dell formally announced its availability for preorder online on 17 March, with shipping from 26 March. We've managed to get our hands on pre-production version of the hardware to bring you our initial impressions.

ZDNet UK's colleagues at CNET.com in the US have looked at a pre-production example of Dell's much-anticipated Adamo notebook.

At first glance, the Adamo, is a stark break from Dell's recent notebook designs, built into an aluminium case with unibody construction — similar to the current MacBooks. The model we have is black (Dell calls it 'onyx') and a white 'pearl' version is also available. The back of the lid and the keyboard tray are split between brushed metal and a fingerprint-attracting glossy finish.

The 13.in. Adamo, toe-to-toe with Apple's MacBook Air (which is about 440g lighter).

About 1.65cm thick, Dell claims this is the thinnest notebook in the world. It's certainly thin, but going toe-to-toe with the MacBook Air, the true 'thinnest' title is open to interpretation. The tapered Air is thinner at its narrowest point, but slightly thicker at its widest point. In either case these are both very slim systems.

Picking up the Adamo, we were surprised at how heavy it felt. At 1.8kg, it's certainly lightweight, but based on the size, we were expecting something closer to the 1.36kg MacBook Air.

Dell is pitching the Adamo as a 'luxury brand notebook design for the luxury conscious consumer', which may not seem like the most timely of ideas, considering the current economic climate and the resultant growth in low-cost netbooks. While the timing may be unfortunate, products such as this generally have long, multi-year production cycles, from concept to release.

As a luxury notebook, the Adamo has plenty of high-end visual touches. The pearl finish has a wavy pattern etched into it, while our black model has a more traditional brushed metal look. Notably, the usual brand and regulatory stickers have been removed, in favour of etching the information directly into a panel on the bottom of the system.

The Adamo is a luxury notebook, with plenty of high-end visual touches.

Instead of the typical Christmas tree of lighting effects found on notebooks in all price ranges, the Adamo has only a handful of small LED lights — for the power button, the touch-sensitive media controls and the caps-lock button, as well as a backlit keyboard. Besides Adamo-branded desktop wallpaper, Dell also created a custom Windows Vista theme for the system, called Adamo Ice. Along with branded accessories Dell plans to offer, it's all part of a concept for the Adamo 'brand ecosystem'.

The Adamo's keyboard is similar in style to a MacBook's or a Sony VAIO's, while the touchpad has an unconventional metal surface.

The keyboard itself is a big change from the typical Dell notebook keyboard, which has always had tall, tapered keys. This borrows more from the Dell Mini 9, with flat, closely spaced keys, similar in style to what you might find on a MacBook or Sony VAIO. We found the keyboard easy to use, but there's a little wasted space at either side of the keyboard tray that could have been used to space out the keys more. The keyboard itself has too much flex in the middle, and the keys are a little clacky — but these could be issues with our prototype hardware. The metal touchpad was very good — sometimes using non-traditional surfaces on a touchpad can add uncomfortable friction and finger drag, but that was not the case here.

The Adamo's 13in. display is very reflective.

The 1,366 by 768 LED-backlit display is behind a sheet of edge-to-edge glass, again similar to the current MacBook line. It's a sleek look, but very susceptible to glare and reflections. The screen hinge is set back about 2.5cm from the rear of the system, leaving what looks a bit like a small handle when the display is open.

Other than a headphone jack and a user-accessible SIM card slot on the right 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 (although dongles to other video connections will be available).

Inside, this prototype unit has a 1.2GHz Intel Core 2 Duo U9300, 2GB of RAM and a 64GB SSD hard drive — these components could change in the final shipping version of the Adamo, and we hear that a 128GB SSD will be standard.

With a low-voltage version of Intel's Core 2 Duo, it's not meant to be a speed demon, however, in anecdotal hands-on use, we found the Adamo to be perfectly fine for normal multitasking — web surfing, working on office documents and media playback — and we'll run a complete series of benchmark tests on the final shipping version. We haven't had time to run a full battery drain test yet, but the battery icon in the system tray claims more than three hours of battery life on a full charge at the default power settings.