Dell Adamo – Style over Substance

My interest was piqued back at CES when Dell announced their new Adamo line of laptops.  They are branded as extravagant, stylish and lightweight alternatives to Apple notebooks for the PC crowd, and given Dell’s push to compete aesthetically with some of the prettier laptops on the market this new line truly showed promise.  On Tuesday the Adamo’s details were leaked and since then most of my excitement has evaporated.

I’m not going into the details (I’ll save that for a link at the end of this post) but this new Adamo laptop is like the Dubai of notebooks.  That is to say Dell seems to have paid most attention to outward appearances and the look of the laptop but when it gets down to it beauty is only skin deep.  The actual hardware inside the sleek chassis is pretty anemic.  The machine’s processor only maxes out at 1.4ghz, and that’s only on the $2,700 model.  That’s right.  $2,700!  The lesser model comes in at $1,999 for a 1.2ghz core 2 duo.  Sheesh…I think Dell is borrowing one of my least favorite parts of the Apple model – premium pricing.

There is some good to be had.  Like I mentioned the machine is beautiful, and each models come with a 128GB solid state drive.  They’ve also worked in DDR3 memory which is a plus.  However that’s all I can really say about the Adamo that’s positive.  One of the best things about purchasing a PC laptop is that you can customize the model by picking and choosing details like processor speed and amount of RAM, but you can’t even do that with the Adamo.  You either get the expensive laptop or the even-more expensive laptop, and hey if you want to you can drop some expensive accessories on top of it for good measure.  The hardware and price on this 13″ beauty just isn’t justifiable.

See the whole nitty-gritty here: Dell.com – Dell Adamo Specifications

Laptop shopping

It’s become painfully obviously lately that I need a new laptop.  The ol’ black macbook (with a Core Duo, not even Core 2) isn’t cutting it anymore.  I’d also like something with a 15″+ screen.  So, check out the Macbook Pro, right?  Not so much.  They’re expensive!

I’ve done some looking around lately and my two most viable options are the Sony Vaio FW and the Dell Studio XPS 16.  The Dell has better components (DDR3 RAM, RGBLED display) but costs a few hundred more than the Vaio.  Despite all of that the lowest end Macbook Pro costs several hundred more than either of them.  The biggest problem is that I like the looks of the Pro more than any laptop on the market, but that really isn’t worth the extra $500 considering I’d be sacrificing a faster CPU and bigger default HDD.

So honestly I’m kind of stuck.  I’ve found that I mostly use my MacBook for work stuff and therefore I’m running Windows on it 90% of the time, so going with a PC laptop seems the best route.  Still, none of them seem perfect.  From what I’ve heard the Vaio has really loud mouse buttons and a less-than-desireable trackpad.  The Dell is…well, a Dell.  It’s got a leather accent on it which treads the thin line between cheesy and classy.  It’s also covered in glossy black finish which would indicate to me that it’s a magnet for fingerprints, even moreso than my black matte macbook.

What’s a geek to do!  Any suggestions?

CES 2009

Today I’m going to continue our trip through early-2009 conventions by talking about some of the announcements from CES that I thought were interesting.

Let’s start with the keynote.  This was the first year that Bill Gates wasn’t the headliner, but I think Steve Ballmer did a good job as far as Microsoft keynotes go.  They didn’t really announce much, and a lot of the cool stuff was just review of what we’ve known for a while.  It seemed like a sort of “State of the Union” Microsoft style, where-in the crew informed the crowd about all of the great things the company has been up to for the past year.  The highlight was definitely the demo of Windows 7, as well as the (predictable) announcement that the Windows 7 public beta would be out soon.  It’s out now and I’ve had an opportunity to play with it a bit, but that’s for another day.  To see the demo, you can check it out here:

http://www.microsoft.com/Presspass/events/ces/default.aspx

The other major announcement that’s caught a lot of people by surprise was the “rebirth” of Palm in the form of the Palm Pre.  I have to say I met this bit of news with a great deal of anticipation, but then I watched the presentation and I was stunned.  The Palm Pre (running Palm’s new Web OS) is, in my opinion, the first true competitor to the iPhone.  Of course this is all speculation right now because a device looking cool in a demonstration and actually being cool in your hand are two different things, but Palm seems to be the first company since Apple to use the “Apple approach” in creating a touchscreen smartphone.  The OS looks great, featuring an easy-to-manipulate interface and some features that might even have iPhone users drooling.  I’ll save the details for a later post so I can dedicate enough words to the device to do it justice.  Just know I was impressed.  You can view the Palm presentation here:

http://www.palm.com/us/products/phones/pre/palm-pre-ces.html

Other than that most of the announcements were hardware and gadget-based.  It’s impossible to do a complete rundown of all of the devices that were announced, so instead I’ll just mention a couple of the things that caught my eye.  Firstly, the Lenovo ThinkPad W700ds is worth mentioning because it has a freakin’ slide-out screen!  Pretty cool.  Also pretty expensive.  This new laptop is meant to be a desktop replacement, and finally solves the conundrum of enhancing a laptop’s monitor size without sacrificing portability.  It’s obvious you can hook most laptops up to an external display, but as I mentioned, you lose the ability to roam because your computer is tethered to that display.  The W700ds solves this problem by having a 10″ slide-out display, giving the user a whole lot of LCD goodness.  It’s a little niche, but apparently the W700ds has been targeted towards artists since it has built-in Wacom functionality.  Not to mention a $3,663 starting price tag.  Ouch.

Camera and display technology was also a big hit this year at CES, but I’m going to stay with notebook computers.  The Dell Adamo looks quite stunning.  It’s a very thin machine sporting an almost Macbook Air-like quality to it.  The Adamo has been branded a “luxury laptop.”  It’s extremely thin and has some industrial design that’s only rivaled by Apple’s line of notebooks.  Dell was kind of sketchy on the details but it seemed to me that the notebook wouldn’t be the only computer or device in the line, perhaps they’re looking to debut some multimedia devices with it as well?  At any rate this is a product to keep your eyes on, if only because it looks so cool.

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