Chicago (IL) – Dell’s briefly posted ad on a luxury products website probably generated much more buzz than the company anticipated. The rumor mill is accelerating and prompted users to search through removed but Google cached pages on Dell’s own servers. The details on what is described to be the world’s thinnest notebook are still blurry, but the accessory pages reveal some of the details of Dell’s  “Adamo Thirteen”.    

Adamo’s marketing pitch is clearly a design that improves on what Apple has achieved with the Macbook Air. Apple’s stunning notebook is only 0.76” thick and weighs about 3.0 lbs. Recent posts on Digitimes indicated that Dell may be able to slightly reduce the thickness of the lid that contains the screen. Apparently, the company has been ordering ultra-thin (and expensive) 3.5 mm (0.14”) panels from Samsung, which could drop the thickness of the Macbook Air’s lid (4.1 mm or 0.16”).

There is virtually no information on the standard hardware equipment of the Adamo Thirteen, besides the fact that it will have a 13” screen and come with a 45 watt power adapter that suggests that Dell will offer Intel’s regular 45 nm Core 2 Duo processors and not use low voltage CPUs. Browsing through Google’s Dell site cache also reveals that the Adamo will be available with a 8x slot-load DVD burner, an optional 2x Blu-ray/DVD-RW drive (with SATA interface) as well as a Displayport to connect to a LCD. The option list includes Displayport-to-VGA, Displayport-to-HDMI and Displayport-to-DVI converters.

Our sources noted that Dell will be offering solid state disk drives (SSDs) throughout the product line. The capacity is said to be (well beyond 100 GB), which suggests that Dell will be offering either 128 GB, Intel’s 160 GB or possibly Samsung’s 256 GB drive, which went into mass-production recently. Strangely enough, Dell has not listed SSDs for the Adamo, but included (external) 2.5” 5400 rpm hard drives with 250 GB and 500 GB capacity, as well as an 8 GB USB memory key.

The notebook is generally expected to be unveiled at CES in early January, while actual delivery of the device is put into the February time frame. Digitimes’ sources noted that the Adamo will cost up to $3000, which mat sound a bit high since analysts such as Endpoint’s Roger Kay previously said that Dell may be able to offer the Adamo for $400 less than a comparable Macbook Air. “Comparable”, of course is the keyword here. Apple does not offer Blu-ray, the Adamo will feature SSDs with more capacity and we expect wireless broadband to be a standard feature in the device. Add everything up and $3000 may not be cheap, but could turn into a bargain when put next to the Macbook Air.

A basic Adamo could start in the $1500 range, we are told.

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