Dell Adamo review

Performance and battery life

The gloriously thin design leaves little room for extravagance on the inside, and we were unsurprised to find the Adamo is powered by a low-voltage Intel processor. The 1.2GHz Core 2 Duo U9300 and an accompanying 3GB of DDR3 RAM produced a score of 0.68 in our real-world benchmarks, which is almost identical to that of the Air, with its 1.86GHz SU9400 processor. Neither is astonishingly quick, but for a laptop like this that’s plenty of power for office work and other everyday tasks.

As with the Air, this Adamo sports a 128GB SSD. It’s not as capacious as we’ve come to expect in today’s laptops, but for the performance and added durability it’s a luxurious trade-off we’re happy with. If you need more, you could take a step up from this “Admire” specification and opt for the “Desire”, which doubles that to 256GB, ups the RAM to 4GB and includes a slightly faster processor.

It also ups the price to £1,899 including VAT, which doesn’t really jump out as an attractive deal. The two are identical other than those core specs, so you’re stuck with integrated graphics that pretty much rule the Adamo out of gaming sessions. The £1,329 inc VAT base package is more appealing, and puts it on a par with the dearer of the two available MacBook Airs.

It’s a very close call on most counts. There’s less than a millimetre between them for thickness, but the Dell weighs around 400g more – not that this dampened the gushing appreciation it received in the PC Pro office.

Where the Dell can’t quite match its rival is away from the mains. The Adamo managed two hours less than the Air in our light-use test, running out of steam just past five hours – a figure that also falls behind the excellent Sony VAIO VGN-Z31VN/X. Both the Adamo and the Air have fully enclosed batteries – so there’s no chance to buy a new one or fit a larger-capacity unit.

Conclusion

If you’re after a stunning machine that’s been designed from the ground up to make a statement, few will outdo the Adamo, a blissful marriage of superb ergonomics and striking design. It may not be as instantly cool as its Apple equivalent, but Dell has proven it’s capable of coming up with a laptop that’s every bit as stylish and desirable.

While the Dell Adamo may not pack the punch of the Sony Z31, given its vastly lower price it’s a much more realistic purchase for most consumers. It’s light, slim and as gorgeous as a slab of black aluminium has any right to be, so it takes a deserved place as our A List ultraportable of choice.