Dell Adamo XPS

Full Review

The Dell Adamo XPS is Dell's premium high-end ultraportable laptop. It is slim, thin, lightweight, has a 13-inch form factor with excellent build quality.

Design
A product the company likes to describe as the "pinnacle of style and product design," the Dell Adamo XPS is even thinner than its predecessor, the Dell Adamo. Thickness varies from 0.38-inch to 0.4-inch on the new Adamo XPS, compared to 0.65-inch across the previous Dell Adamo. The all-aluminum exterior, magnesium chassis is strong and well-crafted, and the entire laptop (with a 4-cell battery) weighs a decent 1.45-kg. The screen is sunk within the bezel, and when the laptop is closed the keyboard chassis sort of fits within the screen bezel's edges -- that is how the Adamo XPS is so thin. A touch-sensitive strip near the screen lid's lip releases the screen latch and the Adamo XPS silently pops open -- pretty cool. The laptop's spine is located way higher on the screen than normally encountered on laptops--this helps the screen to prop itself up supported by the tilted keyboard; not sure if this is the best design for keeping the laptop on your lap, but it's certainly unique. Overall, in terms of design, the Dell Adamo XPS is thinner than but not as light as the unibody 13-inch Apple MacBook Air. The Adamo XPS is even slimmer than the razor-thin Sony VAIO X: 0.4-inch vs. 0.54-inch.

Hardware Features

The Adamo XPS is even slimmer than the razor-thin Sony VAIO X: 0.4-inch vs. 0.54-inch.

The Adamo XPS comes with a 13.4-inch LED-backlit screen (1366x768 resolution). In terms of internal hardware, the Dell Adamo XPS has an ULV Intel Core 2 Duo SU9400 1.4-GHz processor, 4GB of DDR3 RAM, 256GB SSD, and onboard Intel GMA X4500 graphics--very good basic building blocks compared to the likes of the Samsung X360 (discontinued now), the Dell Latitude E4200, and Lenovo Thinkpad X301. There are only two USB ports on the laptop's edges, a DisplayPort and headphone jack. Extra accessories bundled with the Adamo XPS include a USB-to-Ethernet adapter, 500GB external drive, and a DisplayPort to DVI adapter, and a USB-connected optical drive. The Adamo XPS also includes Gigabit Ethernet, Wi-Fi 802.11n, and Bluetooth wireless connectivity. A standard four-cell battery and Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit operating system round up the Dell Adamo XPS' hardware feature set. It's pretty good, although we can't understand why it had to drop the number of USB ports down to two when its predecessor had three.

Performance
The Dell Adamo XPS performed very well in our benchmarks. Its PC Mark Vantage, PC Mark 05, Cinebench scores of 4096, 4423, 3304, respectively, is pretty good compared to some of our Top 5 Ultraportable Laptop recommendations. Multitasking while watching a movie, listening to music, and browsing the Web on Mozilla Firefox 3.6.3 went along just fine on the Adamo XPS. The Adamo XPS' screen is great for watching both text and video files. The laptop could play 720p videos fine, but had trouble playing full-HD 1080p files. Its onboard speakers, however, leave a lot to be desired--we recommend putting on headphones. I liked the keyboard's metallic keycaps--the keyboard response is very good; the metallic touchpad's finely textured and the two isolated mouse buttons provide optimal feedback.

Battery life of the 4-cell battery was just under an hour in our benchmark tests (at high performance preset). I got 2 hours 30 minutes of browsing the Web over Wi-Fi--this may not be the best time out there, but for a 4-cell battery, it's good.

Bottom Line

The Dell Adamo XPS sells for Rs. 1,50,000. Compared to the Apple MacBook Air, you get higher system memory and hard drive space on the Adamo XPS, not to mention Windows 7 operating system. If battery life's not a huge concern, and you want to flaunt one of the thinnest laptops in the world, the Dell Adamo XPS delivers all the style and elegance at a high price tag.