Austin360 blogs > Digital Savant > Archives > 2009 > November > 05
Thursday, November 5, 2009
Dell’s Adamo XPS laptop: unboxing and hands-on
Representatives from Dell Inc. visited the American-Statesman this morning an hour before unveiling to the world the new Adamo XPS laptop.
We’ve seen glimpses of the laptop before, most notably at Austin City Limits festival, but this was the first time I’ve gotten my hands on it and see it up close.
The laptop is only 9.99mm thick and, design-wise it’s breathtaking. The entire bottom half of the laptop folds into a recess in front of the 13.4”-inch screen. The slim computer starts at $1,799 and that gets you 4 Gigabytes of DDR3 memory, a 1.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor, a 128-GB solid-state drive, Wireless-N and a copy of Windows 7 Home Premium, 64-bit edition installed.
The most interesting design characteristic of the Adamo XPS is that the keyboard rises on a hinge to give it an angled profile. I pressed against the keyboard and it has a bit of give — it doesn’t seem too stiff, but at the same time, despite its aluminum construction, I’d be worried about putting too much weight on it. At the very least, it’s a good way to wean yourself off of laying your palms below the keyboard, as I tend to do with my Macbook.
In any case, here’s a video where you can make your own impressions on the ambitiously designed little laptop from Dell:
Image from Dell’s Flickr stream.
Permalink | Comments (0) | Post your comment Categories: Austin, Computers, Gadgets
AT&T confirms 3G outage this a.m. in parts of Texas
I got several messages this morning from iPhone users complaining that they weren’t getting 3G service early this morning.
AT&T confirmed that there were outages in Austin, San Antonio in Harlingen and said the equipment issue has been resolved. In a statement e-mailed from AT&T representative Mike Barger, the company said:
“Due to an equipment issue that began this morning, 3G data service for some customers in Austin, San Antonio and Harlingen may have been disrupted. The issue was resolved around 9 a.m. and service was fully restored. We apologize for any inconvenience to our customers.”
I didn’t notice the outage because I was at home on a Wi-Fi network at the time, but when I checked after 9 a.m., 3G service seemed to be working fine in New Braunfels and up IH-35 to Austin.
Permalink | Comments (2) | Post your comment Categories: Austin, Phones
Motorola Droid: hands-on video
Verizon Wireless allowed the American-Statesman to take a sneak peak at the new Motorola Droid smartphone. It debuts Friday with the Great Hills Trail Verizon Wireless store opening up at 11 p.m. tonight to offer the phone to early customers at midnight.
Other area stores will open at 7 a.m. tomorrow morning and retail sales manager Trevor Bissell says the company is expecting lines for the device, which competes most directly with Apple’s iPhone, as you might have noticed in recent ads.
Verizon let us borrow the phone and I’ll be posting more about my thoughts on it soon. My first impression is that hardware-wise, it feels a little heavy and dense, with harder angles than the iPhone.
That said, it has a beautiful, big screen (larger than Apple’s phone) and the Google Android operating system runs smoothly and quickly on it. It’s very tightly integrated with Gmail, Google Calendar and other Google services and I was pleased with the phone’s Web surfing speed. I’m still not a fan of tiny physical keyboards but this one has nice, large well-spaced-out keys for those who can’t handle an on-screen virtual keyboard.
One major annoyance: a sound effect that says in a creepy, deep robot voice, “DROID!” is cute at first and very annoying after the third or fourth listen. It’s easy to disable.
Like I said, I’ll post more about it soon. It’s far too early to say whether it’s better or worse than an iPhone, but it certainly has some unique features that might make iPhone users jealous.
Permalink | Comments (5) | Post your comment Categories: Austin, Gadgets, Phones, Shopping
