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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.

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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.
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.