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Dell Adjusts Adamo Price to Compete with MacBook Air

Pulkit Chandna — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 16:38:20 -0500

Three months after it arrived, Dell Adamo has received a price cut. A price cut for the Adamo became inevitable once Apple slashed the price of its svelte MacBook Air -perceived to be Adamo’s archrival - in June. Prices of all Adamo ultraportables have been lowered.

The basic Dell Adamo is now available for $1500 as opposed to its original price of $1999. This places it on level ground with the entry-level MacBook Air in terms of price. The basic version has a 1.2GHz Core 2 Duo, 2GB of RAM and a 128GB SSD. But at the other end of the spectrum, the top-end Adamo variant still remains pricier than its MacBook Air counterpart. The new price of the top-end Adamo is $2,230. It features a 1.4GHz Core 2 Duo processor, a 128GB SSD, and 4GB RAM.

Image Credit: GadgetLite

Intel Predicts Ultra-Thin Notebooks Will Cannibalize Netbook Sales with Rapidly Falling Prices

Justin Kerr — Sun, 31 May 2009 19:59:02 -0500

PC makers have been decrying the impact of low margin netbooks on their bottom line for over a year now, but Intel is trying to calm their fears by making new predictions for the future of mobile computing. Numbers posted at the end of March peg netbook sales at around 16 per cent of all portable computer purchases, but Intel claims the steadily decreasing cost of ultra-thin laptops will help to keep that number from growing. The ultra-thin category is traditionally dominated by new ultra low voltage CPU’s, which offer better performance than both Celeron, and Atom processors, with an increasingly more reasonable price premium. According to Intel’s marketing chief, Sean Maloney, "Atom is eating into Celeron. And we're quite fine with this".

Maloney predicts that ultra-thin laptops will start offering stiff competition for high end netbooks priced above $400, primarily because the price difference has shrunk in some cases to as little as a $200. Intel’s internal projections released during the May 12th presentation shows sales increasing exponentially near the end of the year, and clearly, this is where they expect to see the bulk of their growth in the portable PC market.

Intel predicts that future growth markets for netbooks will be children and cellphone providers who bundle 3G service with the computer to further subsidize the price to consumers. Do you think people only buy netbooks because they are cheap? Or are some people just looking for a good ultra-portable?

HP Eyes the Ultralight Business Notebook Market

Paul Lilly — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 10:56:53 -0500

What weighs 4 pounds and measures 12.1 inches? The answer has nothing to do with John Holmes and everything to do with Hewlett-Packard's updated "ultralight" business notebook line built around Intel's Centrino 2 platform.

Cost of entry for the HP-Compaq 2230 series will start at $999 and include an Intel Core 2 Duo T5670 (1.80GHz) processor, 1GB of DDR2-800 RAM, a 120GB 5400RPM hard disk, 802.11n wireless, a LightScribe DVD burner, and Intel's GMA 4500MHD graphics. For $1,649, users looking for a bit more power can move up to an Intel T9400 (2.53GHz) processor, 3GB DDR2-800 RAM, and a 320GB hard drive. Several other configurations fill in the pricing gap, and all of them will come equipped with three USB ports, an HDMI port, and a 4-cell lithium-ion battery.

Centrino 2 notebooks have been slow to trickle into the market, but HP is accepting orders now for its 2230 series.

Image Credit: HP

HP Mini-Note 2133

Will Smith — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 23:00:30 -0500

Explosive performer it is not, but the price is right and this little laptop makes a sweet, portable web browsing rig.

At Maximum PC, our main concern is speed—we like to call it pure PC power. But, as much as we love the massive power available in a desktop replacement notebooks today, our shoulders just won’t let us tote those über-powerful, über-heavy rigs any further than from the sofa to the fridge and back. Even worse, high-powered, ultra-portable rigs are just too damn expensive. And it’s tough to pay more than $2000 for a machine with integrated graphics, even if it weighs only 3 pounds.

Lucky for mobile nerds, there’s a new breed of ultra-cheap ultra-portables on the rise. Thanks in large part to the success of the aggressively priced Asus Eee PC, these new rigs pair lightweight designs and extremely aggressive pricing with a natural performance compromise. The latest entrant is the HP Mini-Note 2133, which costs between $500 and $750, depending on the trim. All four models share the same 1280x720 screen, full-size keyboard, and slick aluminum shell. We’ve spent the last few days testing the high-end, $750 model, which sports a 1.6GHz VIA CPU, 2GB of RAM, and a higher capacity battery.

So, exactly how much do you sacrifice under the hood with a $750 subcompact? We wouldn’t expect the 2133 to be a Ferrari, but we didn’t expect a Yugo either. In fact, if we had to compare this rig to one machine, it would be the trusty Taurus. It’s functional, but doesn’t include any of the bells and whistles that fancier laptops sport, and it’s sure as hell not going to set any speed records. The high-end Mini-Note works great for web browsing, email and other simple desktop tasks. It completely failed at DVD-quality H.264 video playback, and was only able to play Xvid-encoded movies by dropping a ton of frames. We tested the battery with a fairly unrealistic test in retrospect—we pegged the CPU at 100% by playing video and got a mere 78 minutes of playback. We should also note that it’s not entirely fair to say the 2133 didn’t set any benchmark records: it turned in the worst score we’ve ever seen in our Photoshop script.

Mediocre performance aside, the Mini-Note delivers a tight, well-designed package in its slick aluminum chassis. It sports a keyboard that’s almost full size, and the screen looks great. We’re concerned that the hinge doesn’t actually rotate enough to make the screen easily viewable, especially with the standard three-cell battery attached (the larger-capacity battery sticks out the bottom of the laptop enough that the screen can rotate further. Still, this is a perfect rig for around-the-house web browsing, and it would make a killer first laptop for the kids, or even a supplemental rig for those times you need Internet access, but don’t want to sit at your desk.

While we reviewed the high-end $750 model, the Mini-Note is available in a variety of prices and loadouts (check the breakdown at the bottom of the page). The key differences are the operating system (you can choose between SuSe Linux or two flavors of Vista), the memory config, CPU clock speed, and hard disk. While it’s tough for us to recommend any rig with just 1GB of memory, the $550 SuSe config is very interesting.

There are still a few kinks to be worked out in the hardware, and we’d like to see a powerful enough CPU/integrated chipset that the rig will actually play Xvid and H.264 video before we can wholehearted recommend the 2133, but if you’re aware of the gotchas inherent in the device, it could nicely fill a vacant niche in your computing infrastructure.