Dell Adamo 13: CULV Goes Upscale
by Vivek Gowri on July 6, 2010 1:51 AM ESTDell Adamo 13: Battery Life
The Adamo's battery is straight out of the Apple playbook, a sealed-in, non-removable unit using lithium polymer cells. Except for one thing - while Apple generally fits large batteries in their systems (as seen by the 63.5 Wh units in the new 13" MacBook and MacBook Pro and the downright massive 84 Wh battery in the 15" MacBook Pro), the Adamo makes do with a comparatively tiny 40 Wh battery. The MacBook Air ships with a 39 Wh battery though, so maybe harping on Dell for the small battery isn't exactly fair.
But fair or not, it doesn't make the battery life numbers any nicer to look at. Absolute maximum life is just over 6 hours, and under our heavy load browsing test (usually a realistic measure of daily use battery life) is roughly 4 hours. I usually averaged around 3.5-4 hours when using it, maybe a bit less if I had a movie going. As such, the Adamo ran for just under 3 hours in our HD video playback test (a 720p copy of the movie Jumper ripped in the x264 codec - trust me, Jumper on repeat is just as painful as you think it is; it wasn't my first choice of movie...)
The HP ProBook 5310m has a similarly small battery (41 Wh) along with a faster low voltage Core 2 Duo SP9600, and gets marginally less battery life. On a per unit of battery capacity basis, the Adamo is within 10% of all the CULV competitors, and a little bit better than the HP. Considering that the processor is faster than both the SU4100 and the SU7300 that were in prior test units, this is about expected. That the SSD didn't save us any power is kind of disappointing, but considering that Intel's first generation of SSDs were never that much better than standard hard drives with power, it's not a big deal.
Overall, the battery life isn't great due to the small battery, and due to the sealed in nature, you run into the same problem as you do with the MacBook Air: you have an extremely portable system that needs to be tethered to a power cord all the time. However, if you can live with 4 hours of battery life or can carry a charger with you, it's fine.
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afkrotch - Wednesday, July 7, 2010 - link
Remember back in the day when the Longhorn Alpha came out? Then those same features showed up in OSX. Then Longhorn got canned and had to be rebuilt all over again. Why not a single word from Mac fans about how they stole Windows features? I'm sorry, but both Apple and MS will steal whatever from each other. Apple is probably the worst of the two. Everything they build is just someone else's work, shined up to be pretty.OSX is the preferred platform in the Art profession? Really? When? 1990s? The only ppl you see bothering with it is stupid college kids or just regular home consumers. Go out into the real professional world and tell me how many ppl still bother. Even all your big companies have long since dumped Apple.
Unix underpinnings. What's the point even mentioning it, when they took all that was great about Unix and threw it out the window. I played with OSX a while ago. Ya, a toy for home. I can't possibly see it being used for any real production work. Right now, I'm a sys ad for our Solaris 10 workstation/servers, Linux google server, Trusted Solaris 8 server, and a couple Windows 2003 servers. Guess what our custom built software is now being created for? I'll give you a hint. It's created by Microsoft.
jkostans - Thursday, July 8, 2010 - link
I work for an engineering firm, and no one uses OSX. Linux for some engineering apps, and windows for everything else. This is the way 99% of the world works, get used to it. OSX is not superior to windows. If it was businesses would use it more.mojohacker2010 - Saturday, July 10, 2010 - link
"The Lenovo may be a nice machine but... (other than fanboy nonsense) Windows 7 definitely does play second fiddle to OSX in the majority of serious comparisons"LOL...please cite some sources or you sound just like a fanboy yourself. Rather you sound like a very defensive and angry fanboy. Almost all of the head-to-head comparison articles/tests I've seen show windows 7 beating OSX overwhelmingly...
"Anyhow, one can just do a simple poll of satisfied, hassle free OSX users vs Windows (xp/vista/7). "
Really? So you're gonna compare an ecosystem with billions of users vs. OSX, which no one uses, and use that as an argument? LOL
retrospooty - Tuesday, July 6, 2010 - link
"More reliable? A cheap plasticky Lenovo? Puh-lease. Plus you run the archaic Windows OS on it"Uh.. Yes, Lenovo is the most reliable in the buz, and that included Apple. The X301 rocks. Its solid, lightweight and Has Win7, which is far better than OSX in my opinion.
Also, the MAcbook air is its competition. THe X301 is a thin CULV notebook and has an internal DVD player. Yes, its FAR better than the MAcbook air, or regular 13 inch macbook, or dell.
chrnochime - Wednesday, July 7, 2010 - link
Didn't really want to waste time reading when your name even includes osx. Guess the more patient commenters out there took your bait and wasted their time LOLIvanAndreevich - Wednesday, July 7, 2010 - link
I find it offensive when someone calls a high end Thinkpad "cheap and plasticky". If a Thinkpad and Macbook Pro knock heads I'm sure the Thinkpad would survive more often than not.erple2 - Tuesday, July 6, 2010 - link
The Envy's suck? Huh. I like mine just fine. It runs circles around any MBP that's available today. And runs quite a bit cooler at that. Granted, that's comparing the 15" MBP...The MBP doesn't get that good of battery life in Windows, btw. At least not significantly better than other C2D based laptops with NVidia processors...
adhan - Tuesday, July 6, 2010 - link
I'm not trying to be too much of a fanboy here, but how about a MacBook with Windows running via Boot Camp.sleepeeg3 - Tuesday, July 6, 2010 - link
Both colossal ripoffs.Wander7 - Tuesday, July 6, 2010 - link
thanks for all the comments. I know about boot camp and also the crappier battery life running windows under it. I don't like the Envys because of the bad touchpad ( I have a dm3 now...). My main attraction to the MB Pro are the hardware aspects of the machine and the battery life.I found out Sony makes some nice laptops, but WAY overpriced tho.... I'll just keep waiting.