Tuesday, March 17, 2009

The Dell Adamo, trendy, high-tech, fashionable and sexy

Dell hopes PCs can't be too rich or too thin
Tuesday March 17, 12:02 am ET

Monsieur, you're getting a Dell: PC maker uses couture to sell luxury laptops in recession
The way it came on the scene, it could have been a rare perfume or a designer handbag, undaunted by the roilingeconomy.

The first rumors of it surfaced in December on a lifestyle magazine's blog. A few weeks later, it was spotted in the arms of runway model Hollis Wakeema in a Las Vegas hotel.
Then came its Web site: Black and white fashion photos fade in and out as cool piano notes drop and melt into a warm, smooth beat. Prepare to fall in love, the site reads.

Now, go buy the laptop.
Specifically, Dell Inc.'s new $2,000-and-up laptop. The computer maker was entering the ultra-thin notebook race Tuesday with the Adamo, from the Latin for "to fall in love with."

The aluminum-body laptop comes in two colors, "onyx" and "pearl." It boasts a 13-inch screen and, with a depth of less than two-thirds of an inch, is thinner than both Apple Inc.'s 0.76-inch MacBook Air ($1,800 and up) and Hewlett-Packard Co.'s 0.7-inch Voodoo Envy notebook (from $1,900).
Even the customer support package goes upscale. Dell will guarantee the same team of service representatives for $99 for a year or $349 for three.
Dell, known for affordable, no-frills computers, leaned away from consumer-electronics tropes and toward the seductive imagery of couture as it designed a marketing campaign to fit the Adamo. The leap Dell is asking consumers to make from its core brand would be a risk in any economy, let alone the worst recession of the personal-computer age. PC sales are sliding and the lone bright spot in the market appears to be small, inexpensive "netbooks," Adamo's polar opposite.

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