Encouraging notebook anorexia: Dell launches Adamo

Dell's fashion-first Adamo notebooks are now available for pre-order on the company's site. The super thin notebooks may offer reduced computing power, but they are the current apogee of Dell design.

The notebooks are thusly presented in oddly angled black-and-white pictures in the style of a fashion photo spread, both with and without the requisite supermodels. The fashion facade can only last so long, though. In fact, if you bypass all of the fashion-related imagery and go straight to the ordering page, the Adamo's boxy aluminum frame and textured surfaces really are borderline industrial in design. One can't help but be reminded of the diamond tread plates on a Mack truck or a Zero Halliburton aluminum briefcase when looking at the Adamo.

All Adamo models are 0.65" thick and weigh about 4 pounds (1.81 kg), offer a 13.4", 16:9 HD display, a backlit keyboard, 1.3 Megapixel webcam, 3 USB ports, 802.11n, Bluetooth 2.1, and Lithium Polymer batteries that promise a 5+ hour lifespan.

The $1,999 "Admire" configuration begins with a 1.2 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo Processor, 2 GB 800 MHz DDR3 RAM, and a 128 GB SSD, while the $2,699 "Desire" configuration offers a 1.4 GHz, 4 GB, the same 128 GB SSD, and on-board mobile broadband.

Perhaps presenting the Adamo in the context of fashion is appropriate when taking the notebook's thickness into consideration. At 0.65 of an inch, the Adamo is thinner than Apple's Macbook Air (0.76"), HP's Voodoo Envy 133 (0.7"), Lenovo's X300 (0.75"), and MSI's X320 (0.79"). Yet, while Dell managed to make Adamo razor thin, it managed at the same time to make it heavier than all its counterparts. Adamo comes in at 4 pounds with no additional features, while Apple (3.0 lbs.), HP (3.37 lbs.), Lenovo (2.9 lbs.), and MSI (2.86 lbs.) are all considerably lighter.