Dell Adamo Admire Onyx 13.4-inch Ultraportable Laptop PC

Mar 16 2010 - Dell's Adamo Admire is about a highly attractive ultrathin laptop with a reasonable $999 price tag. Many who might consider a MacBook Air but don't want to spend as much would likely choose the Adamo simply based on its style and cost. Performance is good even if the battery life isn't quite up to the ultraportable market these days. Items such as the solid state drive and high quality diplay are a nice touch and atypical of this price range.

Mar 16 2010 - Dell's Adamo Admire is their affordable version of their high profile ultrathin laptop. At just seven tenths of an inch thick, it has a very slim profile but some strong features for a $999 price tag. Performance is actually quite good for such a thin laptop thanks to the Intel Core 2 Duo SU9400 processor. It does only come with 2GB of DDR3 memory that puts it at a slight disadvantage to memory intensive applications or heavy multitasking but many who buy ultraportables generally don't mind much.

Rather than use a traditional hard drive, the Dell Adamo Admire uses a solid state drive. This does limit the amount of storage to just 128GB of data which is well below what hard drives can achieve but it does offer snappier performance when loading applications and data. The drive is also more compact than traditional hard drives allowing it to have the slimmer profile. Like most ultrathin laptops, there is no optical drive included. Users can opt to purchase an optional external USB DVD burner drive is available albeit at a pricey $120.

The 13.4-inch display on the Dell Adamo Admire is one of the better on the market. The picture was very colorful and bright and had very wide viewing angles. It does use a glossy coating that is extremely popular right now that can produce a fair amount of glare and reflections under certain lighting conditions. The integrated Intel GMA 4500MHD graphics processor doesn't allow the system to be used for any sort of 3D gaming but provides sufficient performance for handing HD video streaming on the laptop. The display resolution does limit it to watching 720p video and hooking it up to a HDTV is a bit more challenging as it only comes with a DisplayPort connector. Dell does offer a $20 adapter cable for use with HDMI monitors.

While there are a lot of ultraportables on the market now with extremely long battery life, the Adamo does suffer a bit in this area. In my streaming video playback test, the Adamo Admire was able to run roughly three and a half hours. This is well below the consumer ultra-low voltage models but the Adamo does offer more performance. More typical usage will probably yield around five hours of use. Those hoping to extend the running time by swapping batteries will be disappointed by the internal non-replaceable battery.