Dell unveils Adamo, the world’s thinnest notebook

The PC maker has taken the wraps of what it says is the world’s slimmest laptop, complete with one of the planet’s fatter price tags.

The Adamo is a finger-thin 1.64cm when closed, and sports a raft of high-end features, including an edge-to-edge, 13.4-inch high-definition glass display and Flash memory rather than a traditional hard drive.

Later today Dell will open pre-orders for the Adamo (pronounced a-doh-mo) in 24 counties, including New Zealand, where it will cost a cool $NZ4499 for an entry-level model with a 1.2 GHz Intel Core2Duo processor, 2GB of memory, a 128GB solid state drive, two USB ports, one USB/eSATA port and a display port.

Yes, it's the thinnest
The Adamo is roughly the same dimensions as its key competitors (pictured below) in the recently-minted “ultrathin” portable category: Apple’s MacBook Air and Lenovo’s ThinkPad X300, aka Kodach (both available in New Zealand for around the same price; a fourth contender, HP's Voodoo Envy, is not).

While the Macbook Air is 32.5cm wide, 22.7cm deep and has a thicknes of 0.4cm to 1.93cm along its fluted shape, the Adamo will be 33cm wide, 24.1cm deep and a uniform 1.65cm thick.

But not the lightest
However, the Adamo is slightly heavier than the MacBook Air or the Kodachi, at around 1.7kg (the average laptop comes in around 3kg to 3.5kg). The Air, by contrast, comes in around 1.36kg.

The Adamo does get good notices for its aesthetic, which sees a “spun metal” finish fashioned in sharp lines, a widescreen, near-borderless display, and a scalloped keyboard. It’s a step up from the blocky, pedestrian design applied to your average Dell portable.

What's left out
Unlike much cheaper but thicker and stubbier netbooks, ultrathins like the Adamo offer full-size screens and keyboards, squashing other features ultra-flat to accommodate to achieve their svelte form factor.

Ultrathins do share some drawbacks with netbooks, however.

While Dell has yet to supply full specs, it has confirmed that options like a Blu-ray drive (or DVD drive) and HDMI connectivity will only be available through plug-in extras. Lenovo's Kodachi is alone in offering an optical drive.

Dell says its new Adamo brand will be extended to additional models beyond the initial ultrathin launched today.

Below: four views of Adamo:

Apple's MacBook Air:

IBM's "Kodachi" Thinkpad X300: