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Dell drops ultrathin Adamo 13 to $899

Dell has dropped the price on its ultrathin Adamo 13, making it an even more attractive alternative to the pricier MacBook Air.

Brooke Crothers Former CNET contributor
Brooke Crothers writes about mobile computer systems, including laptops, tablets, smartphones: how they define the computing experience and the hardware that makes them tick. He has served as an editor at large at CNET News and a contributing reporter to The New York Times' Bits and Technology sections. His interest in things small began when living in Tokyo in a very small apartment for a very long time.
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Brooke Crothers
The Dell Adamo 13 is very thin and made from aluminum--just like Apple's MacBook Air.
The Dell Adamo 13 is very thin and made from aluminum--just like Apple's MacBook Air. Dell

A lower-priced Adamo 13 has popped up on Dell's Web site. The Adamo page is now showing the price of the aluminum-clad ultrathin laptop at $899--and this discount comes with an unexpected bonus, too.

The Adamo is a slick, well-conceived alternative to Apple's 13-inch MacBook Air, which now starts at $1,299. And at 0.65 inches thick, the Adamo is about as thin as a 13-inch Windows laptop gets.

Dell has not only brought down the price but also upped the configuration from the $999 model it had been selling for a while. Now, for $899, you get a 2.13GHz Core 2 Duo SL9600 Intel processor and 4GB of memory--along with the standard 128GB solid-state drive and 64-bit Windows 7.

Before, the Adamo 13 had been offered at $999 with a lower-performance, ultra-power-efficient 1.4GHz Core 2 Duo chip and 2GB of memory. The more robust 2.13GHz configuration had been selling for $1,099, before dropping to $899.

Other specs remain the same: a machined-aluminum chassis, 13.4-inch screen, 6-cell battery, with the option for an internal broadband 3G modem. Ports include USB and USB/e-SATA and Ethernet.