Reviews

Dell Adamo laptop review

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

11 Sep 2009

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.

.imgHideOnJavaScriptDisabled_4059a8rkuteh7oc { display: none !important; }

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.