Dell claims title of 'world's skinniest'

By Jake Widman
Saturday, 07 November 2009 05:56

Home IT

Dell officially announced a new laptop, the Adamo XPS, which the company says is the world's thinnest. It's supposed to be available for the holiday shopping season.

An advance unit of the Adamo XPS was spotted by iTWire a couple of weeks ago at a Microsoft Windows 7 launch event, but few details were available.

Now Dell has confirmed that it will have a 13.4-inch widescreen display and weight only 3.2 pounds. It runs on a 1.4GHz Core 2 Duo ultra-low-voltage processor, will come with 4 GB of RAM, and is equipped with Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit.

But the most touted spec is the laptop's thickness, which runs from 9.7 mm to 10.3 mm (0.38 to 0.41 inches). By comparison, the MacBook Air is 4 to 19.4 mm (0.16 to 0.76 inches) thick, though at 3 pounds it's slightly lighter than the Adamo. And the recently announced Toshiba Satellite T100 series -- also called "ultra are 22.1 to 34.3(0.87 to 1.35 inches) and weighs 3.88 pounds.

The Adamo XPS has a unique way of opening. To unlatch the case, the user slides a finger along a strip at the front. The strip is too narrow to be a fingerprint readers; it's hard to tell from the video Dell released exactly what it might be doing.



The hinge is not at the base of the screen half but a little ways up. That means that when the laptop is open, the lower part of the screen forms a base that raises the keyboard up at an angle.

And the keyboard itself is very thin, because the XPS's expansion ports are on the side of the screen half.

The XPS is still not mentioned on the main Dell site, but the company has set up a special site for it, www.adamobydell.com, where those interested can sign up to be notified when it's available. There's no price given on the site, but it has been reported to start at US$1,799.