Review: Dell Adamo

What kind of a computer did you buy when your eye is on the bottom line and you didn't give a damn about aesthetics? No brainer: Your top choice was a Dell.

And it can still be a Dell. (Don't worry there's still enough nondescript desktops to go around.) But the Texas-based PC maker also wants you to look at it as a forward-thinking, design-centric hardware maker with its thin and light Adamo.

Quite lovely to behold and, at $2,300, roughly four times the price of your typical Dell computer, the Adamo is without question one of the most handsome notebooks on the market. Sure, in typical Dell fashion, the industrial designers were allowed to run amok a bit more than they ought to have, leaving the top of the Adamo awash with five different stripes of color and texture. Combined, the striping lends a retro effect that's thankfully more Mad Men than Mad Max.

The rest of the laptop invokes Apple all the way, featuring a silver chassis with clean edges, an infinity-glass (read: frameless) screen, a backlit keyboard, and even a Mac-like skin for the preinstalled Windows 7 operating system.

Sadly, for all its glitz, the Adamo is a bit lackluster in the performance department. General application benchmarks are on par with many cheap laptops, and serious gaming on the Adamo is wholly impossible due to the lack of any kind of serious video processing power. Even battery life is nothing special, just a touch over two-and-a-half hours.

Blame the pokey 1.4GHz Core 2 Duo for the notebook's minimalist chops. But the other specs – including a 256GB solid state hard drive, 4GB of RAM, and a super-bright LCD (1366 x 768 pixels) – are generally top shelf.

As is the price, unfortunately. One of the most expensive laptops on the market (outside of juiced-up, ultra-gamer notebooks), the 4-pound Adamo is a tough sell versus, say, the 4.5-pound MacBook Pro 13-inch. Apple's notebook, which isn't officially a "thin and light" machine, is considerably faster and has an optical drive. It's also $800 cheaper. Geez, when's the last time you saw Apple as a bargain?