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(Credit: Dell)

Dell offers a tantalizing sneak peek at a revamped Adamo laptop today, with a photo and brief teaser description of the new system:

9/9/09 comes only once and today Dell is offering a glimpse of its highly stylized, thin 9.99-millimeter Adamo By Dell concept that's as beautiful as today's date is unique.

You'll recall the original Adamo was similarly teased at CES 2009, and we brought you a first-ever hands-on look of it back in March. At the time, we said: "Dell's upscale Adamo is a 13-inch laptop for those who value design and finish as much as performance, but its luxury price will limit the potential audience."

Details on the Adamo 2.0 (our nickname) are scant right now, but if you want a sneak peek at Dell's new "world's thinnest laptop" candidate, head over to www.dell.com/AdamoXPS.

Tempted to upgrade yet?

(Credit: Sarah Tew/CNET)

For those tempted to give in to Dell's vision of thin-and-sort-of-light luxury, the Dell Adamo laptop has been lowered in price by half a thousand dollars; $1,499 gets you the 1.2GHz Core 2 Duo version of the 13.4-inch aluminum laptop with a 128GB solid-state drive, while $2,299 gets you a 1.4GHz processor, 2 extra gigabytes of RAM, and mobile broadband connectivity. You can still have your choice of pearl or onyx.

Suddenly the MacBook Air seems like a pretty good deal at $1,499 with a 1.83GHz Core 2 Duo and 120GB hard drive, or $1,799 with a 128GB SSD and 2.13 GHz processor--and, might we add, GeForce 9400M graphics.

All Dell needs to do now is lower the price by another $500, and we've got a quasi-deal.

In our review of the Adamo, we liked the design but made note of the relatively exorbitant price. Have any of you bought an Adamo? In this climate of ever-lowering laptop and Netbook prices, would a price drop like this convince you at all?

(Source: LogicBuy via Engadget)

Hewlett-Packard was one of the early trendsetters in the ultrathin laptop market with its Voodoo design. But the product has languished for more than a year. What happened--or what will happen--isn't clear.

The ultrathin laptop market is hot and one of the most visible laptop segments today. And activity in this segment has spiked recently in the wake of a raft of new, inexpensive thin laptops from MSI, Acer, and Lenovo, using low-power Intel chips.

HP's Voodoo Envy was a trendsetting ultrathin laptop but it hasn't been updated in a year.

(Credit: Hewlett-Packard)

The Apple MacBook Air and Dell Adamo are two of the most prominent designs. The Air has now been refreshed twice. Dell's svelte Adamo was announced in March, complementing its ultrathin business laptop, the Latitude E4200.

But the razor-thin 0.7-inch-thick Voodoo Envy 133--first announced in June 2008--has stood still. ... Read more

On Monday, the Apple MacBook Air reached a new price low as a wave of sub-$1,000 ultrathin laptops get set to break onto the market.

MacBook Air prices as updated Monday on Apple's Web site

(Credit: Apple)

The ultrathin, trend-setting 13-inch notebook made a steep descent from its rarefied, luxury-laptop pricing altitudes. The top-of-the-line Air with a 128GB solid-state drive fell $700 in price to $1,799 from $2,499 and gained a slightly faster 2.13GHz Core 2 Duo processor. The new prices are now posted on Apple's Web site.

The lower-end version with a 120GB hard disk drive fell to $1,499--the lowest price to date for a new (not refurbished) MacBook Air.

The price cut is happening just as PC makers, including Lenovo, Acer, Asus, and MSI, are debuting new ultrathin laptops at price points decidedly lower than the executive-jewelry genre of ultraportables that dominated the market for years.

Lenovo's 3.5-pound 13.3-inch IdeaPad U350, for example, will start at $649. At the other end of the pricing spectrum, the top-of-the-line, ultrasleek Dell Adamo is still listed at $2,699. The clock may be ticking on these lofty price levels, though.

On Monday, Apple also upgraded its comparably sized 13-inch MacBook to MacBook Pro status. The new 13-inch MacBook Pro has the same unibody design but now includes a seven-hour battery, a FireWire 800 port, an SD card slot, a backlit keyboard, and an improved LED-backlit display with a greater color range.

With Nvidia GeForce 9400M integrated graphics, a 2.26GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor, 2GB of memory, and a 160GB hard disk drive, the 13-inch MacBook Pro is priced at $1,199. A model with a 2.53 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 4GB of memory, and a 250GB hard disk drive is priced at $1,499.

Apple's entire laptop line gets revamped.

(Credit: CNET)

Not to be left out, the MacBook's been updated too, and it's no longer just a MacBook. Following in the wake of the 15-inch MacBook Pro updates, the 13-inchers will also be called MacBook Pros (because as Phil Schiller noted onstage, "At what point isn't this just a MacBook Pro?") The mid-range unibody aluminum laptops launched last October now have upgraded color screens, SD card slots, FireWire 800 ports, and backlit keyboards across the board. Prices start at $1,199, $100 less than before for the low-end aluminum MacBook, for an upgraded 2.26 GHz Core 2 Duo with 2 GB DDR3 RAM, GeForce 9400M graphics, and a 160 GB HDD. $1,499 gets you a 2.53 GHz Core 2 Duo, 4 GB of DDR3, and a 250 GB hard drive. RAM can now be expanded up to 8 GB, and hard drives can be upgraded up to 500 GB.

They will also have non-removable 7-hour batteries. This makes the entire Apple laptop line a family of sealed-in batteries, except for the lowest-end white MacBook, whose specs were bumped last week.

Also updated, to some applause, was the MacBook Air, upgrading the processor speed to 2.14 GHz and lowering the price range, now $1,499 to $1,799. That's required in light of CULV Windows laptops that are emerging at very competitive price points. It's available in two configurations: $1,199 for a 1.86 GHz Core 2 Duo, 2 GB DDR3 RAM, GeForce 9400M graphics, and 120 GB HDD, or $1,799 with a 2.13 GHz Core 2 Duo and 128 GB SSD. For the SSD model, the cost is $700 less than before.

It's been a busy day for Apple.

In addition to quietly updating the consumer-friendly MacBook, Apple on Wednesday also launched an iPod promotion targeted to students.

The iPod Touch

(Credit: CNET)

With the promotion, students, faculty, or staff members can buy a MacBook, MacBook Pro, MacBook Air, or iMac and get a free iPod Touch. Of course, students and educators can also see if they qualify for additional savings through Apple's education store.

There is a bit of a catch. You have to buy the iPod Touch at the same time as the Mac to qualify for a rebate. After the purchase, you fill out the rebate online and wait for the money from Apple.

To qualify you have to be a student or employee of any K-12 or higher-education institution. Parents of a higher-education student are also eligible for the program. Full details are available from Apple's Web site. The promotion ends September 8. Rebates must be submitted by October 9.

Apple has a long history of offering its education customers discounts and incentives when they head back to school. However, this year is a bit different because many students haven't even left school yet.

Typically, Apple starts this type of promotion in the summer and ends it in September. The earlier start date may be a way for the company to try to boost Mac sales over the summer.

A notebook from MSI portends the crush of lower-cost, Intel-based MacBook-Air-like laptop designs to come.

The MSI X-Slim series herald Apple MacBook Air-like laptops without the luxury laptop tax

(Credit: MSI)

As I've written before, consumer ultra-low-voltage (CULV) chips will arrive in earnest this summer. The X-Slim X340 from MSI (Micro-Star International) is using the ULV SU3500, a precursor to lower-cost CULV Intel chips to come.

(Note: On April 19, Intel cut prices (PDF) on a wide range of processors. Though the SU3500 didn't see any cuts, the prices on its low-power cousins, the SL9400 and SU9400, were reduced 10 percent and 9 percent, respectively.)

What is CULV exactly? Well, one thing it's not is the Netbook-centric Atom processor: the 1.4GHz SU3500 is based on Intel's higher-performance mainstream Core 2 architecture. But like the Atom, it's a single-core chip. Single core means low power. In this case, the SU3500 draws only 5.5 watts, more than the Atom but a fraction of the dual-core mainstream Intel mobile chips rated at 25 and 35 watts. It also comes in a small 22mm chip package.

And what does all this mean? Better performance than Atom-based Netbooks. And in a well-designed system, longer battery life than a mainstream laptop.

Oh, and lower prices than luxury laptops like the Apple MacBook Air and Dell Adamo, which start at around $1,800. The MSI X-slim 340 with the SU3500 was launched this week in Japan and the higher-end version starts at around $1,000. U.S.-based reports say it is priced at $1,100.

The ultra-thin HP Pavilion dv2 laptop powered by AMD's Athlon "Neo" chip is also in this price range. AMD CEO Dirk Meyer said Tuesday that the single-core Neo processor will get a dual-core sibling dubbed "Congo" by summer.

Let the low-cost laptop competition begin.

(Credit: Macenstein)

Despite its ridiculously slim profile, the Apple MacBook Air is apparently tougher than tough. According to a report by blog site Macenstein, a survivor of the Turkish Airways crash in February this year, Sefer Baris, closed his Apple laptop and put it in a slipcase moments before the plane hit the tarmac.

Surprisingly, the notebook's chassis was merely bent, not broken (refer to image). Though the LCD panel was damaged, the MacBook Air still managed to boot up and allowed access to the precious data within. If you thought the reason it survived was because the laptop happened to be far away from the damaged sections, the owner suffered a fractured neck and required a series of surgeries before he could walk again.

While we can't say the unibody MacBook Air is as hardy as a ToughBook or ThinkPad just from this isolated incident, it's good to know that its premium design isn't as frail as it looks.

(Via Crave Asia)

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(Credit: Acer)

More specs:

Acer also announced the anti-Aspire 3935-6504: the 18.4-inch Aspire 8935G.