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The Adamo thirteen’s main shortcomings can be found inside its beautiful body. For starters, the CPU is an anemic 1.2 GHz ultra-low voltage Intel Core 2 Duo U9300, which is good enough for common tasks but actually struggles quite a bit when it comes to playing high-def and even some standard resolution videos. Even with 2 GB of DDR2 RAM, playing recent games is simply out of the question thanks to the weak CPU and onboard graphics. Wi-Fi N, Bluetooth 2.1, Gigabit Ethernet, a 1.3-megpixel webcam and Windows Vista Home Premium 64-bit are standard, though not exactly thrilling. The only really cool piece of hardware inside it is the non-optional 128 GB solid-state hard drive. You can choose a Pearl Adamo thirteen with a 1.4 GHz CPU and 4 GB of RAM for an additional Rs 20,000 and also outfit it with a matching external hard drive or DVD-RW, but there are no configuration options for the graphics, memory, storage, or anything else. Dell has also attempted to pretty up the software. Windows Vista sports a custom login screen background and all desktop icons are by default hidden in favor of a dock-like launcher bar on the top of the screen. The launcher seemed needlessly intrusive, with programs like Windows Media Player listed under “Music” as well as “Videos” and some truly ghastly animation effects. Dell also bundles a few webcam-related applications to let you add special effects on the fly (at the cost of some serious lag) or video chat via common IM protocols. Battery life is claimed to be five hours, but we only managed this by leaving the Adamo thirteen on and doing nothing. Moderate usage including Web surfing and a bit of movie playback gave us less than three hours in testing. Not only is the battery non-removable and non-user replaceable, but there is also no LED indicator to tell you whether it’s charging or not. Benchmark scores were also quite underwhelming, with only 2448 points in our CineBench test. The audio compression, video transcoding and file archiving tests took 223 seconds, 127 seconds and 133 seconds respectively; nearly twice the time taken by most of the mainstream notebooks we’ve recently tested. In fact the test scores veer dangerously close to netbook territory. You could easily get performance like this in a sub-Rs 40,000 laptop today. Dell is betting rather heavily that there are enough people who have no budget constraints and who care only about looks. While there’s nothing stopping you from buying an Adamo if you like it, you should know that a whole lot better can be had for half the price. Form clearly wins out over function with this one, but if you only want a laptop to be seen with in public, nothing quite beats this one. |
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