Adamo Ex Pee Es.
Say hello to the Dell Adamo XPS.
Dell have been teasing tech journos with titbits for a while now, but they’ve finally revealed everything and announced the machine will be available (in the US, at least) before Christmas. The specs turn out to be “the usual” for a laptop that is so very, very thin (1.4GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, GS45 integrated graphics, 4GB RAM, 128GB SSD, no optical drive and Windows7) but it does have a couple of special tricks. The first and most obvious is that uniquely positioned hinge. The hardware is kept as slim as possible by having the body drop out of the “lid” half and by mounting the hinge part-way up the machine, the Dell designers have gifted the user both an elevated keyboard position and an in-built “laptop cooler”. The other piece of “fancy” employed by the Adamo XPS is the screen latch – there is no physical switch, button or latch but rather section of the lid is touch-sensitive and pops open when stroked. Geek heaven.
Sadly, this geek isn’t taken in by the Adamo XPS. First off, i’d be too worried about that electronic latch system failing – it wouldn’t be too hard to envisage a situation where you can’t get the thing to open, or indeed keep it closed. Also, how do you use this laptop atop your lap with its strange design? I mean, it’d be possible but would it actually be comfortable for any stretch of time? I can’t imagine so. Finally, for a machine carrying the Adamo badge, it shares little styling with the original Adamo and, i think, looks very cheap by comparison. I wasn’t too enamoured with the original Adamo but the XPS makes that computer looks like design gold.
Dell must be applauded for trying to do things a little bit differently to the rest of the Windows PC market but on this occasion i’m not convinced.
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Update: Not sure how it was possible, but I forgot to mention the Adamo XPS’ claimed battery life is a little over two and a half hours. We all know how to take manufacturer’s battery life claims with a pinch of salt. So, what can we expect in the real world? About 2 hours? Pathetic.
Update #2: It seems Dell had some other fancy ideas for the Adamo XPS. See SlashGear’s report on the prototypes.