Monday, January 17th 2011
New Value 13-inch Dell Adamo Variant Surfaces
After giving its price-performance ratio a huge boost in late December, Dell introduced an even newer value variant of the Adamo ultra-slim ultra-portable notebook. The company's latest offer includes a 13.4-inch Adamo priced at US $799 ($100 less than the performance variant introduced last month), and driven by Intel Core 2 Duo SU9400 (clocked at 1.40 GHz), and 2 GB of memory. The 13.4-inch screen offers 1366 x 768 pixels resolution, and the chipset embeds Intel GMA X4500 graphics. Storage is care of a 128 GB SSD. Connectivity includes WiFi and Bluetooth. Other features include a 1.3 megapixel webcam. Windows 7 Home Premium x64 comes preinstalled.
12 Comments on New Value 13-inch Dell Adamo Variant Surfaces
This IMO manages to fall right in the nitch market of completely pointless tech.
Given the big-ish SSD, I'd say the price is just right for what it does. The Macbook Air 13" costs almost twice as much, which is a lot to pay for a decent IGP, an almost equal CPU and a couple more pixels in the display.
Yeah the fashion nowadays is to have some hardware (fusion, ion, sandybridge, etc) that will allow you to enjoy 1080p videos and moderate 3D games, but for pure productivity this is just enough.
I do my everyday work in my Ferrari One, which has a Neo L310 (Athlon I 64 X2 downlocked to 1.2GHz + HD3200 IGP) and I feel no lag whatsoever working with Access databases, web browsing (+/- 10 tabs at a time) and listening to lossless music at the same time.
The SSD and the better CPU should make this a lot faster than my system, for the tasks
Sure, the IGP allows me to watch 720p videos from youtube, but it's not like I need to have that during work.
Nowadays, a Fusion would have made more sense, but laptops with the the APU are still not for sale, and this one is.
Maybe the specs+price reduction are just a way to remove the current stock and introduce a sandybridge or fusion model, anyways.
I am glad to see that while Bulldozer desktop offerings are still up in the air about what we will get, the buzz and love for the new APU's is good. They were never an option for this as this was in R & D for at least a year most likely. Decisions about its construction were most likely finalize sometime last year. I guess Q3. And even if I am right, their were better options for this at that time as well that would have fit into this things obviously small thermal window with better performance.
To me, this lappy just screams, "We cut corners to save money so we could drop the price below the Macbook Air." Well congrads, it is cheaper than the Air, weaker than the Air, doesn't have a smaller cousin like the Air, and not as stylish as the original Adamo. But damn good move squeezing in that SSD to make it appear more powerful. That will help this setup a lot. Too bad the SSD's performance is most like bottom tier, and yet still wasted in a system that will do little more than web browse and play Angry Birds.
Main thing that does bother me is the look of the keys.
just use some metal/al shell to build a proper 13" inch portable that can withstand traveling!
13" 720p No Gloss screen
Nvidia 4200 GPU ala ION
and 60-120GB SSD in a metal shell-> then i am sold!