Dell Adamo laptop review

Dell shows that it can do cool too, with the ultra desirable Adamo.

The keyboard eschews the Scrabble-tile design of the MacBook Air and Sony VAIO Z-series, in favour of wide, slightly concave keys. They're comfortable, too, with a solid base and nice typing action, although the slightness of the laptop does mean key travel is a little shorter than perfect. As you'd expect, Dell's layout is entirely practical, with a double-height Enter and wide left and right Shift keys.

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The trackpad has nothing innovative to rival the Air's multi-touch flexibility, but it's responsive and smooth while the mouse buttons are light and easy to click.

The gloriously thin design leaves little room for extravagance on the inside, and we were unsurprised to find the Adamo is powered by a low-voltage Intel processor. The 1.2GHz Core 2 Duo U9300 and an accompanying 3GB of DDR3 RAM produced a score of 0.68 in our real-world benchmarks, which is almost identical to that of the Air, with its 1.86GHz SU9400 processor. Neither is astonishingly quick, but for a laptop like this that's plenty of power for office work and other everyday tasks.

As with the Air, this Adamo sports a 128GB SSD. It's not as capacious as we've come to expect in today's laptops, but for the performance and added durability it's a luxurious trade-off we're happy with. If you need more, you could take a step up from this "Admire" specification and opt for the "Desire", which doubles that to 256GB, ups the RAM to 4GB and includes a slightly faster processor.

Mike Jennings

 

Mike Jennings has worked as a technology journalist for more than a decade and has been fascinated by computers since childhood, when he spent far too long building terrible websites. He loves desktop PCs, components, laptops and anything to do with the latest hardware.

Mike worked as a staff writer at PC Pro magazine in London for seven years, and during that time wrote for a variety of other tech titles, including Custom PC, Micro Mart and Computer Shopper. Since 2013, he’s been a freelance tech writer, and writes regularly for titles like Wired, TechRadar, Stuff, TechSpot, IT Pro, TrustedReviews and TechAdvisor. He still loves tech and covers everything from the latest business hardware and software to high-end gaming gear, and you’ll find him on plenty of sites writing reviews, features and guides on a vast range of topics.

You can email Mike at mike@mike-jennings.net, or find him on Twitter at @mikejjennings