Dell Adamo Unveiled
Today Dell officially confirmed that they will be releasing a new ultrathin laptop called the Adamo. The Adamo is a sleek laptop with an aluminum chassis, with a strikingly similar appearance the HP Voodoo Envy 133. Dell has not revealed any final specifications, and we are unable to discuss what we saw in the current version, but we did get a chance to handle and use the current Adamo prototype.
Dell has been rumored to be working on the Adamo for a while now, and they've been refining the design during that time. Since the launch of Apple's new MacBook lineup, a lot of people have been impressed by the quality of the aluminum construction, and the Adamo we used definitely looks and feels like a high quality notebook. As a side note, we asked about the possibility of using this sort of chassis Dell's other notebooks. Dell indicated that the amount of time and energy required to produce such a chassis is simply too long to do on a mass scale (not to mention the cost), so it will likely remain in smaller volume products. Dell simply ships far too many laptops to be able to produce that many chassis in a timely fashion.
Dell was kind enough to let us take some photographs of the current Adamo prototype; again, keep in mind that things could change slightly before the product actually ships. The current plans are for two base models, one black and the other white/silver. While they both look incredibly stylish, we have to admit that we are partial to the white notebook, since Black has a nasty habit of showing every single fingerprint/smudge, even with a brushed aluminum surface.
While this appears to be an upper end product, Dell has always done exceptionally well in the realm of mass production, so there's a reasonable chance that the Adamo could end up being more affordable than the competition. We hope so, as there's a lot of demand for a light ultrathin notebook that can still pack more power than the current netbooks. Final pricing and details will have to wait until Dell is closer to shipping the Adamo, which should be sometime later this spring.
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acejj26 - Friday, January 9, 2009 - link
Display Portstrikeback03 - Friday, January 9, 2009 - link
I thought left was eSATA, right was DisplayPort, and the power connector is the standard type on the far right. Looks like it would match the power brick shown.UNHchabo - Friday, January 9, 2009 - link
Don't know about the left port, but the right one isn't eSATA, it's DisplayPort.UNHchabo - Friday, January 9, 2009 - link
After looking at the photo of the black model, the left port (right in that photo, since it's upside-down) looks to be a combination USB/eSATA port! I didn't know such a thing was possible!And the circular port is the power input; look at two photos of the power brick.
tdawg - Friday, January 9, 2009 - link
So, I know you can't give details on specs and such, but can you say if this is going to be more in line with better notebook specs, or low power netbook specs?JarredWalton - Friday, January 9, 2009 - link
It's not a netbook - the size is around 13" I think (you can try to estimate based on Anand's hand size in the picture LOL). I think we're also okay with saying that it's not using an Intel Atom CPU, so this will be higher performance than the netbook category (and more expensive, naturally).Just as an aside, for those that are interested, dual-core Atom CPUs are currently desktop-only chips, so they really don't belong in a notebook. Sure, you could put one there, but they have a larger package and power use is significantly higher than the mobile version of Atom. This was one of the topics we discussed with some companies at CES - they pretty much said that dual-core Atom wasn't suitable for use in laptops in the present incarnation. So, if you want dual-core Atom in a netbook or laptop, you'll have to wait a while longer.
sprockkets - Saturday, January 10, 2009 - link
It's called Intel does not want to cannibalize thier C2D sales buddy.JarredWalton - Tuesday, January 13, 2009 - link
Perhaps, but what would you rather have? A dual-core Atom consuming 8W and providing the performance of a Core Duo 1.2GHz chip (yes, that's the Yonah core I'm talking about, not the later Merom stuff)... or a Core 2 Duo chip that requires the same power, has a better feature set, and significantly better performance? Sure, Atom costs less to manufacture and Intel can therefore sell it for less, but will they actually do so?Atom is really about providing "just enough" performance; if I got a 13.3" notebook with an Atom chip, I know I'd end up disappointed with the overall experience. Anand has an article up on the new NVIDIA Ion platform that discusses Atom more in-depth, and it gives some very good reasons why we likely will never see it in full-size (i.e. 12" or larger) notebooks.
http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=3499">http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=3499
JonnyDough - Saturday, January 10, 2009 - link
Anand has such smooth sexy hands. He should totally model.