Dell Adamo: Love machine takes on the Air

The Dell Adamo is looking to seduce with its slender hips and onyx or pearl colour schemes. But how does this skinny new laptop match up against the current thinnest, the MacBook Air?

Richard Trenholm

Richard Trenholm was CNET's film and TV editor, covering the big screen, small screen and streaming. A member of the Film Critic's Circle, he's covered technology and culture from London's tech scene to Europe's refugee camps to the Sundance film festival.

See full bio

Richard Trenholm

March 17, 2009 5:17 a.m. PT

1 of 8

It's a little late for Valentine's Day, but that hasn't stopped Dell unveiling the Adamo, a new ultra-thin laptop with a name that's Latin for 'to fall in love'.

Our US colleagues have had their hands on the new machine, and made the obvious comparison between the Adamo and the similarly svelte Apple MacBook Air. Specs-wise, Dell's new love machine packs a 1.2GHz Intel Core 2 Duo U9300, 2GB of RAM, and a 64GB SSD hard drive.

Like newer MacBooks, the Adamo is housed in a unibody chassis milled from a single piece of aluminium. It comes in brushed black onyx or white-etched pearl. The Adamo will be positioned at the centre of a new range of similarly fancy accessories, including 250GB and 500GB external hard drives, external DVD and Blu-ray drives and more.

Open the Adamo, and you'll get an eyeful of the 16:9, high-definition, 13-inch, edge-to-edge glass display. Unfortunately, it packs an integrated rather than dedicated graphics chip to handle the visuals natively, so it won't deal with 3D rendering terribly well. Still, this is designed for portability rather than power.

The Adamo certainly scores over the Air in that it has double the number of USB ports -- two. Other connections include a USB/eSATA port, DisplayPort video output and Ethernet connection, all placed on the back. On the right, there's a headphone jack and a user-accessible SIM card slot. You can connect to the cloud via Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and optional integrated mobile broadband.

Take a look at our hands-on pictures courtesy of our 'Merkin cousins, as they pit the Adamo against the MacBook Air. Forget about falling in love, let's have a fight!

2 of 8

Aren't they thin? The Air is thinner at the thinnest point, but that's cheating as far as we're concerned. It's thicker at the thicker point, which in our eyes makes the Adamo the thinnest laptop going. Take that, Steve "I just pulled a computer out of an envelope" Jobs!

3 of 8

Here's the swish case the Adamo comes in.

4 of 8

What's this? A secret compartment! We love a secret compartment.

5 of 8

These are the Adamo's backlit and scalloped keys.

6 of 8

Here we see the Adamo and the Air spooning. Don't they make a lovely couple?

7 of 8

This is the Adamo's metal trackpad.

8 of 8

The Adamo will shimmy into shops on 26 March, with prices starting at an eye-watering £1,650. That's slightly more than an Air, but you can't put a price on an extra USB port, right?