Dell Launches Luxury Thin Laptop Despite Recession

In what Dell has hyped as the world’s thinnest laptop, the Adamo kicks off a new “Adamo by Dell” brand, intended for style-minded people and to disrupt “perceptions of what personal computing is today,” the company said in a statement.

The Adamo is milled from a single piece of aluminum and features a scalloped backlit keyboard and a glass high-definition edge-to-edge display, measuring 13.4 inches by 16.9 inches.

Connectivity is available via Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and optional integrated mobile broadband. Users can choose between Onyx or Pearl, as well as a 250GB or 500GB external hard drive; an external DVD+/-RW or Blu-ray disk drive; and, in the United States, 24/7 access to Dell technicians with Adamo Premium Service.

Adamo offers 5-plus hours of battery life, and pricing begins at £1649 and rises with the inclusion of mobile broadband and a 1.4GHz Intel Core Duo processor over a 1.2GHz processor and 4GB of 800MHz DDR3 dual-channel memory.

Adamo weighs 4 pounds, is 0.65 inches thick and measures 13.03 by 9.5 inches. By comparison, the Apple MacBook Air, with a 13.3-inch diagonal display, weighs 3 pounds and measures .76 by 8.94 by 12.8 inches. It was introduced in January of 2008.

Similarly, the Lenovo ThinkPad x301, released in August 2008, has a 13.3-inch display, weighs 3.9 pounds with its adapter and measures 0.7 by 9.1 by 12.5 inches.

Statements about Adamo from Dell nod to the ideas of creating a design that’s timeless and evokes emotion—and that Adamo will be a flagship product, drawing buyers to the brand.

Derived from Latin, Adamo means “to fall in love”.

The question Dell faces now is whether customers are willing to fall in love with a pricey laptop at a time when the economy continues at a sluggish pace and when both businesses and consumers are spending less on hardware such as laptops and desktops.

At the same time, a new generation of mininotebooks and “netbooks” has shown that vendors such as Dell, Hewlett-Packard and Lenovo can create small, lightweight laptops that cost from £250.

In the weeks leading up to the Adamo launch, Dell announced its latest quarterly results and announced that not only will it begin to cut costs—Dell began cutting workers earlier this month—but it will also focus more on the netbook and low-cost laptop market.

It remains unclear whether Adamo represents just a fraction of Dell’s plan for the future or whether the company is serious in its efforts to overhaul its PC design to compete against stylish offerings from other high-end executive laptop makers, such as Apple and Lenovo.