More buzz on the Dell Adamo laptop

Is Dell Adamo a MacBook Air Killer? | TechzTalk

On Wednesday, Dell updated its Adamo website that now states, “Prepare to fall in love. Introducing a love story from Dell.” And the whole blogosphere went crazy calling Adamo the MacBook Air killer. Before Adamo, the blogosphere has called Lenovo ThinkPad X301 and Voodoo Envy 133 a MacBook Air killer. But both of them turned out to be just another ultra thin and light notebook, nowhere as revolutionary as the MacBook Air. So is the Dell Adamo a MacBook Air killer or just another thin and light notebook?

Well, the answer depends on two factors exterior design and internal hardware. First lets consider external design, we can see from the image above that Adamo is not as thin and sleek as the Air. The front of MacBook Air measures just 0.16-inch, Dell Adamo is not even close to that. The back of Dell Adamo has an Ethernet port that means the back is thicker than 0.7-inch the height of the Ethernet port, which would make it thicker than the thickest part of the MacBook Air. Actually, if you consider the Ethernet port it looks like the Adamo is nearly as thick as the new Unibody MacBook that Apple released last October. Even though like the MacBook Air, Adamo uses aircraft grade aluminum casing, it will weigh 3.9 pounds, which is almost a pound more than MacBook Air. So design-wise the Adamo is nowhere near MacBook Air.

Now lets consider the internal hardware, Dell hasn’t released any information about the hardware yet, but our sources say that Dell will mostly use the 1.2GHz and 1.4GHz ULV processors from Intel and integrated Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 4500MHD. The result of this processor and graphics card selection will be that Dell Adamo won’t match the performance offered by 1.6GHz SL9300 Core 2 Duo processor and NVIDIA GeForce 9400M graphics processor used by lower-end MacBook Air. Hardware-wise also Adamo is no match for MacBook Air, even though it will be released almost 6 months after MacBook Air was updated last year.

To compensate for lack of revolutionary design and hardware performance Dell will advertise that Adamo has more ports or more configurable options. Review websites will also talk about number of ports rather than actually comparing performance of the two laptops. But the truth is, like ThinkPad X301 and Voodoo Envy 133 before it, the new Dell Adamo will be just another thin and light laptop, not a game changing one.