laptop

Take it from us: the Adamo looks like no other Dell you’ve ever seen. The company which made its name building boxes and helping turn the PC into a commodity has invested heavily in design and research over the past few years. Indeed, we’d suggest that if Steve Jobs had unveiled an Apple-badged Adamo as last year’s new-look MacBook Pro, the applause would have just as loud and the lustful sighs just as longing. That’s a compliment to Dell’s design team, because good design lives outside the false boundary of brands.The Adamo follows a straight-cut and decidedly modernistic European mode compared to the tapered and organic futurist conceit of the sylph-like MacBook Air. In keeping with its ‘luxe laptop’ positioning the Adamo is cast from a machined aluminium frame, finished with a stylishly eye-catching pattern etched on the lid and a scalloped backlit keyboard. Fashionistas will appreciate that the Adamo will be available in Onyx and Pearl, compared to the single silver sheen of the MacBook Air.
 * Design **

The Adamo also has a slightly larger footprint than the MacBook Air – it’s 33 cm (13.4 inches) wide by 24.1 cm (9.5 inches) deep, against the MacBook Air’s 32.5 cm (12.8 inches) and 22.7 cm (8.94 inches).
 * The world’s lightest laptop? **

While both the Adamo and MacBook Air are fitted with the latest 45nm Penryn-class Core 2 Duo processors, the MacBook Air has the meatier powerplant in Intel’s low-voltage SL series, with a choice between 1.6GHz (SL9300) and 1.8GHz (SL9400). Dell opted for the less power-hungry but equally less powerful ultra-low voltage Core 2 Duo SU, running at 1.2GHz (SU9300) or 1.4GHz (SU9400). And there’s much more to this than clock speed: the MacBook Air’s SL chips are packed with 6MB of cache and run through a 1066MHz front size bus, giving them a clear edge over the 3MB cache and 800MHz bus of the parsimonious SU processorsFor graphics, Adamo relies on Intel’s embedded GMA X4500HD engine while Apple favours NVIDIA’s GeForce 9400M graphics processor.The Adamo wins back a point for being able to take 4GB of RAM whereas the MacBook Air is stuck on 2GB, but the MacBook Air still has more muscle to begin with.
 * Performance **

We’re going to have to base this one off the vendor’s stated battery life figures until we can do a side by side test under identical circumstances. Of course, the manufacturer’s battery figures are best viewed through rose-coloured glasses, and in most cases are attainable only under the most aggressive power management settings – low screen brightness, minimal usage and certainly no wireless Internet. So while Dell rates the Adamo’s six-cell lithium polymer slab as good for five hours, against Apple’s allowance of ‘up to 4.5 hours of wireless productivity’, we don’t feel confident to call this in Dell’s favour without some real-world benchmarking.
 * Battery **

Dell takes this round without breaking a sweat. While both the Adamo and MacBook Air pack the mandatory 11n Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 2.1, only Dell lets you option up with integrated 3G (in the higher-spec $4,299 model). For bonus points, the wireless card also includes a GPS receiver and is rated to 7.2Mbps on both the 2100MHz 3G and 850MHz Next G bands (although not 900MHz, which Optus and Vodafone are using for their national mobile broadband network extensions). Best of all, you’re not tied to a single telco. While the 3G model of the Adamo will include a Vodafone SIM card and come preloaded with Vodafone’s software (and most likely some sort of sign-up wizard or link), the SIM card’s not activated – leaving it up to the buyer to choose one of the Vodafone plans on offer or sign up to another carrier. The modem isn’t locked to Vodafone, although Dell cautions that it’s not certified for any other network.
 * Connectivity: wireless **

This is a simple game of count the ports. The MacBook Air infamously shorts its buyers with a single USB port while the Adamo has three, one of which also doubles an an eSATA port. With the Adamo you also get Gigabit Ethernet (missing from the MacBook Air) and a standard DisplayPort socket rather than a far-from-common Mini DisplayPort socket (so you need to shell out $45 for an adaptor available only from Apple). The only caveat we’d make is that the Adamo relegates all these ports to the rear of the chassis. We doubt there’d be sufficient room on the low profile side panels for anything but the tiny headphone socket, which indeed sensibly lives on the right side panel. While this out-of-sight arrangement undoubtedly benefits the Adamo through clean uncluttered lines, it’s a headache when you need to plug in a USB memory key, iPod or similar device which has only a short-term connection to your notebook.
 * Connectivity: wired **

The Adamo’s 13.4 inch panel provides a barely noticeable boost over the MacBook Air’s 13.3 inch display, but pumps the pixels up from Apple’s 1280 x 800 to a hi-res 1366 x 768 for 720p HD (WXGA 16:9).
 * Display **

Both of these bantamweights are stocked with a 128GB solid state drive, but Apple also offers a 120GB hard drive in the entry-level MacBook Air. We’d rather have SSD any day, but the price difference means you can get a MacBook Air for $2,899.
 * Storage **

The Adamo comes preloaded with the 64-bit edition of Windows Vista Home Premium. The MacBook Air, of course, runs Mac OS X 10.5 and can also run Windows Vista (and XP, and Windows 7 beta, and let you switch between them if you want). So while we don’t want to enter into the OS slanging match, it’s pretty clear which notebook grabs the gold medal here.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 10.5pt;">Operating system **<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 8.5pt;">