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Dell Adamo Review — Macho Outside, Sissy Inside
Odelia Lee writes with a full review of Dell's new Adamo slimtop over at Gizmodo. While it may have an sleek exterior there are definite gaps (both literal and figurative) in their engineering. "The Adamo is both a compliment and an insult to Dell engineering. It's possibly the most beautiful computer Dell has ever manufactured, but I'm not sure that Dell has caught up to competitors in either aesthetics or power. There have been lots of qualitative Adamo reviews out there, but we got the first of the units that will actually ship to customers, so it's time for real benchmarks. As it happens, performance is really what's at stake here."
Why don't you just wind it down and give the money back to your shareholders? Or stick to servers.
Will the Dell Adamo be able to play Eveo Online at least?
I think the article summary nails it.
Bigger, heavier, louder (which, to me, is half the point of something like the air), integrated battery (just like the air), bad performance, higher price... what's the point?
It's nice looking, but it sounds like an Air is a much better all around computer. The only thing in it's favor is the higher max RAM (Apple will probably change that) and the integrated 3G option (I'd expect Apple to change that too). Gizmodo is also right that nVidia's next chipset for netbooks will outperform this, at 1/5th the price. It has eSata too though, which is a plus.
Nice try Dell. It is certainly very nice visually. But you need some substance to go with that, or at least a cheaper price point.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
Dell Adamo, for when you want to be pretentious, but you can't afford Apple.
And yes, that website is hideous Flashturbation. I dare you to "encounter," "admire," "discover," or "commit" anything useful about the Adamo on the page. Apple gets credit here for blending marketing and tech specs. Where is the audience for Adamo? They already bought Apple or they're scratching their heads trying to find out how much RAM and CPU it has.
(-1, Raw and Uncut is the only way to read)
Anything is better than a fruit.
The processor speed of the Macbook Air was a lot higher than the Adamo. The Adamo easily outpaced the Lenovo with the same processor speed.
Of course processor speed isn't everything.
The video card is the key here (or so the reviewers would have your believe).
In the real world that this device was meant to operate in, I suspect Joe User would never notice the difference in video performance since its adequate for YouTube.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
The Adam0 is a bore.
Great design? It's squarer than the Air, sure. Great? Well, it is cleaner than anything I've EVER seen from Dell.
Light? It's a full pound heavier than the Air -- now that's a fatty!
Can you make a commercial begging someone to take your money and buy a light laptop and NOT buy the Air?
Nope! -- At $2600 for an Adama that does not out perform the top end Air at 2,499.00 (starting at 1799.00 btw).
I still don't know why ppl drool for Netbooks either ... at least these things have full size keyboards and screens. If all I did was email and surf it'd be great.
And BTW -- who cares about HDMI out? I don't really care as long as I can hook the device up to a projector or external monitor. Both the Adam0 and the Air satisfy this need.
This is the epitome of crappy consumer journalism. It is IMPOSSIBLE for a reader to establish the value of the product.
Damning it with manufacturing issues when the consumer that cares is not Dell's primary customer. Were the issues preventable? Yes. Would the end-user price gone up to a point it no-longer makes sense to a Dell customer? Probably.
Damning it with performance issues. Again, the price would have been negatively affected by trying to make it mac-like. Not to mention driving *Dell* customers away!
I'm not a Dell consumer at all, but there was a very good reason they have become as large as they are. Customers think the product is 'good-enough.' This is a super-slim laptop that will be a good fit for Dell customers.
Damn you Gizmodo! Daaaammmmmmnnnn you!!!!!!
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
Good point.
If you have a ribbed dildo up your ass, you probably don't care about this.
Lots of these reviews for portables talk about power. I couldn't care less about power. I have a three-year-old Pentium M with 512 MB of RAM (shared with the graphics!) that was OVER-powered. All I used was the browser, some console apps, and occasionally a media player. I replaced the laptop, but only because the hinges were shot. I didn't even use half of the memory on the thing.
No, for me battery life is more important than power. "The biggest mistake Dell made with this system, by far, was the inclusion of Intel's GMA X4500HD GPU." Then there is a graph of FPS. I'll take battery life over FPS. (Unfortunately it looks like this Dell is good at neither of those.)
Penny - plain text accounting
Your entire post would make sense if only one thing were true. If this PC weren't MORE expensive than the closest Mac counterpart, you could excuse poor build quality, under-powered processor, and heftiness as merely being good value for dollar. But that's not true. It's MORE EXPENSIVE than the Air. A slim laptop that's more pricey than the already overpriced status symbol that is the Macbook Air, but provides significantly less value? Somebody failed, and failed hard.
Just another "DOJ fascist authoritarian totalitarian bootlicker" -- Zeio
They could give it a gruff exterior, but it would kick the ass of any other computer that got in its way, Apple or Cylon.
I'm still trying to figure that out. It does not exceed the specs for the MBA especially in price which is what Microsoft's new ad campaign is all about.
I guess if you need a MBA form-factor that runs Windows this is your thing. I'd much prefer to run Windows virtually in the MBA though.
I didn't know Alabama had a large Latino population, much less a large population of Latinos on drugs.
and cheaper. 1.2Ghz dual core processor? Wtf? My 2 year old 3lb thinkpad has a 1.8Ghz dual core processor, and I bought it new for half what an Adamo costs 2 years ago. If an Adamo was a cheaper alternative to a thinkpad I could understand, but it's more expensive too! Why would anyone in their right mind buy a Adamo instead of thinkpad?
buy a thinkpad
Dell have created, with the Adamo, what is effectively a pocket calculator for the price you're getting. Christ, I've seen machines on sale for less than £400 (around $800 at the time) which are more powerful than this thing.
In no way is it the most beautiful machine Dell's ever made. The black (sorry, Onyx) colour isn't too bad, but both types have a Quasimodo hunch-back, which seems to serve no purpose other than to store the bits they couldn't fit in to the rest of the machine because they were desperate to make it thinner than the MBA. It's also nowhere near as nice as the Studio Hybrids. Heck, the Inspirons are prettier than the white/pearl Adamo.
Those using pirated Tinysoft signatures(TM) are a real threat to society and should all be thrown in jail.
Sorry, but I'm not paying twice what I spent on a (quite nice) Inspiron only to get a laptop with less vertical pixels.
Why not 1440x800? That's almost the same aspect ratio. Or 1366x800.
It *does* look rather gorgeous, though.
Michel
Fedora Project Contribut
Adamo commercial
The Adamo is coming into a hard market segment:
If people want an ultralight laptop, like people pointed out, they can grab a Macbook Air. IIRC, you can just zero out the Air's disk and install Vista without needing Boot Camp if one felt like it. Or, one can keep OS X and use Boot Camp to make Windows XP work (which would be lighter on system resources).
If people wanted a Windows machine (where it is expressly noted that the machine is not a Mac) for professional use, Thinkpads are the black limousine of the laptop world. People can purchase a Thinkpad X Series.
This is nothing against Dell. Dell's competition just has better offerings than what it has in this market segment. If I were buying business desktop PCs, regular laptops, or servers, I'd strongly consider Dell. However, for a premium ultralight, the competition is ahead here.
Thank you, Gizmonic, for introducing me to yet another word I expect never to use in polite company. :)
Cheers,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
I don't understand why everybody things this thing looks so good. It looks so awkward like the components don't fit together properly and it has no style. It's absolutely hideous.
So since the processor and graphics are slower than the Air, shouldn't the battery life on the Adamo be better? What's the Air rated at for battery life, and then how does it actually do?
it's a $2000 netbook?
Is anyone else bothered by the fact that the slot for the ATT SIM Card (a more elegant solution than USB device by God!) kind of tilts the playing field in the direction of one vendor? If I were to pay that much for a laptop I would want everything about it to be "general purpose" to the largest extent possible.
This is a genuine question, not a troll. I'm really interested in the answer.
What is the meaning of comparing the GHz as a major factor in evaluation of a laptop? I'm a bioinformatician. I do most of my work on an X40 Thinkpad. For small jobs, this is more than sufficient. For major calculations, one or two cores will not suffice, no matter what the GHz.
From my experience, for most of the tasks, a difference of even 10% in the speed is not an issue, and anyway, there are dozens of other factors that influence both, the real computing speed and the reactivity of the interface. To me, things like memory, disk access, networking, cacheing, usage pattern and last but not least, what software solution you have picked for your task seem to be more influencial on the overall perfomance than a difference between 1.6 or 1.86 GHz. Yet in most comparisons (e.g. several posts here on Slashdot), when talking of a laptop, first two things to mention are the price tag and the GHz.
Question: am I missing something? What is so important about the GHz of the processor to use it as a proxy for "performance"? Is it just historical, or maybe because it is easy to quantify, like in the case of megapixels in digital cameras (which are nowadays mostly meaningless, but easy to compare)?
j.
That commercial would have been perfect, if only Ricardo Montalban were still with us to tout the "Rich Corinthian Leather" of the Adamo (and hey, they DO talk about leather around 2:17 in the Adamo video).
It could be in a wrist pad...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
They're competing in a market filled with people BUYING MACBOOK AIRs. They don't need to be intelligent. They just need to look expensive.
Quartz Extreme and Core Image. Are there any other real reasons to spend all that money on generic hardware?
it actually serves up a decent page, with a couple pics and some specs. I think the Adamo is pretty hideous, personally, and I'm no Dell hater.
I LOVE my Dell Mini 9. $220 shipped, $20 upgrade to 2GB memory. Runs Ubuntu like a champ.
Don't let this overpriced Edsel turn you off to their entire line.
The Adam-O machines are clearly using the low powered versions optimised for battery life.
If this gives you an extra 3/4hr battery life(*), some would count that as a feature over raw performance.
(*) I just made that figure up but you get the idea.
Gizmodo is a useless site. They are 100% apple fanboys. Almost every post is apple centric. Anything anyone comes out they claim it an apple copy. I never believe them. I have seen so much in the past and stopped following it now. I have high regards for Slashdot and a site like this quality should never refer to a site like quality less cheap Gizmodo. Please moderator do not let the value of Slashdot go down by allowing posts like these with no quality or from sites that lack quality.
I would hate to buy a laptop only to find you need a fucking TORQUES bit to open it!
When it comes to measurements, I'm much more interested in how long it takes from when you open the lid to when you can check you email or load a web page. So wake time, plus wifi auto connect time, plus DHCP config time, plus browser/mail connection and load/rendering time. Also, I'd be interested to know how long it will not only run on a charge, but also how long it will sleep on one, and whether I can swap batteries while it's sleeping and have it stay asleep. Assuming the battery is replaceable of course.
Most of the "performance" above is not hardware related at all, but software related, like how the wifi drivers and network protocols like DHCP are implemented, and how well the stack is vertically integrated. They're somewhat dependent on performance and capabilities provided by the hardware though.
For a laptop I think this is much, much, much more important than how well it plays some game.
I can't remove the battery.
When working on laptops, popping the battery is one of the first steps before you start to dig into the guts. Is there a physical disconnect switch on this Dell? What if the battery is bad as shipped? Who swaps the battery out if/when needed, and does that void the warranty?
Don't tell me to get a life. I'm a gamer; I have LOTS of lives!
...for people who confuse style with design.