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Dell Lithe to compete AppleMacBook

While other reviewers might note how the Dell notebook tries to rival the svelte and minimalistic Apple MacBook Air, I think the Adamo’s utilitarian and sophisticated design places it at the other end of the spectrum – it is elaborate and luxurious while remaining lithe.

The pearl-white version of the machine I reviewed made quite a first impression, arriving in a clear plastic capsule reminiscent of an iPod nano’s packaging.

The machine’s glossy 13.4-inch screen is sharp and bright. It’s only 0.65-inch thick but the dense laptop weighs 1.81kg.

On the inside, there are touch-sensitive buttons for media playback and volume control and a well-spaced, back-lit keyboard. I especially liked the attention to detail given to the keyboard – it had a slight concave curve that made it easy to feel your way around it and a readable, unique font.

There’s no built-in disc drive, but USB and eSATA ports allow it to be connected to external storage and drives. They’re placed at the back of the laptop, too, so wires won’t clutter the sides.

You can fit the Adamo with an Intel Core 2 Duo processor but don’t expect too much horsepower, with speeds capped at 1.4GHz. The speakers were barely audible because they were placed behind the lid. There’s a slot for a SIM card so you could surf using a mobile broadband service, but we’re told this feature isn’t included in the models sold here.

The inclusion of a 128GB solid state drive as standard has also made the price of the Adamo skyrocket: It starts at $1,500

reference channelnewsasia

Nokia E72 Review

If you walk around Raffles Place during lunch time often enough, I reckon you’ll see more than your fair share of the Nokia E71, the smartphone favoured by many corporate types.

It’s shiny, it’s lithe and it boasts the ease of use you’ve come to expect from a Nokia phone, with the added bonus of a Qwerty keyboard and a smartphone-grade operating system.

Well, its successor, the E72, will reach our shelves in the third quarter of the year.

Nokia hasn’t messed much with the form factor, but it has added an optical navigation key so you can zip through menus, emails and images that much faster.

The camera’s been upgraded to 5 megapixels and there’s also a rockin’ 3.5mm audio jack so you can plug in your own earphones. Other niceties include built-in GPS, with a digital compass to boot.

On the software side, the 3.5G E72 includes Nokia Messaging that will let you chat on instant messaging platforms like Yahoo Messenger, Google Talk and Windows Live Messenger.

The phone is equally capable when it comes to handling corporate email accounts based on Mail for Exchange and Lotus Notes.

The E72 was launched on Monday at the Nokia Connection 2009 event in Singapore, alongside the touchscreen-based 5530 XpressMusic phone and the 3719 clamshell phone.

reference channelnewsasia

Samsung Jet

The quad-band 3.5G phone packs a brilliant 480dpi 3.1-inch WVGA AMOLED display (800×480 pixels), a 5-megapixel auto-focus camera, built-in A-GPS and a MicroSD slot (up to 16GB) into a sleek black body slightly thicker than 1cm.

The main selling point is the Jet’s blazing fast 800MHz application processor. In comparison, the latest iPhone 3G S, which is supposed to be super-speedy, only sports a 600MHz processor.

Of course, the Jet runs on a different platform on Samsung’s proprietary operating system with its latest TouchWiz 2.0 user interface (UI).

Some of its features include Samsung’s Dolfin Internet browser, 3D media gate UI, motion-response UI, smart unlock, a three-page main menu and a three-page widget screen.

The Jet comes with 33 widgets and around 40 more that are downloadable online. The Jet also supports multi-window browsing and “one-finger zoom”.

The UI is pretty responsive – I can use my thumb to zoom in and out of a picture and even pan a photo easily. Moving from page to page in the main menu with the swipe of a finger is a breeze.

The widget screen is fully customisable, and widgets can be moved and expanded with just one digit. But given the Jet’s supersonic processor, I have to admit I was expecting something even faster.

reference channelnewsasia