In the realm of beautiful, shiny things Dell's new Adamo XPS is among the shiniest and most beautiful. And, if we were in the business of judging (note)books by their covers, we'd leave that at that. That's not our business, though; the Adamo XPS is a gorgeous conversation piece, but a computer worth $1,800 it is not.
At 0.4 inches thick, the XPS is the thinnest notebook you can buy. It pulls off its trim profile by incorporating a new hinging kickstand configuration. The keyboard folds out about a third of the way up on the body from inside the recessed 13.4-inch display. When open, the whole thing rests atop the battery (that's the bottom third). There's no mechanical button release to open 'er up; instead, you rub your fingers over a heat sensor that releases the keyboard and the notebook slowly unfolds itself. The base configuration weighs in at 3 pounds.
That's about where the cool of the XPS wears off. It runs on an intel 1.4GHz ultra-low voltage processor -- not exactly befitting its premium price. It ships with a 128GB solid-state drive and 4GB of DDR3 800 memory and 64/bit Windows 7. Even with the concession of a low-voltage processor, battery life is still on the (extremely) short side, rating about 2 hours 30 minutes.
The Adamo XPS is right on the trend of ultra-thin computers like the Sony Vaio X series basically torpedoing their own chances of adoption with painful overpricing and sad li'l spec sheets. And we wish them luck; they're gonna need it.
