Once the pins are released, the bottom panel simply lifts up.

The battery connects to the motherboard with an orange ribbon cable. This cable should be disconnected before entirely removing the bottom panel.

The Adamo and Air with bottom panels removed.

The MacBook Air we're using in this guide is the original model (released over a year ago). Despite it's age, the Air still packs a 1.6 GHz Core 2 Duo processor, 33% faster than our Adamo's 1.2 GHz processor.

To its credit, the high-end Adamo does include 4 GB of built-in RAM, double that of the Air.

Dell labels a lot more parts than Apple. This definitely makes our job easier, even though it's not quite as photogenic.

The bottom panel contains an integrated 6 cell Li-Polymer battery pack.

The 11.1 V battery is rated at 40 Watt hours, an improvement over the MacBook Air's 7.2 V, 37 Watt hour battery. (Dell's manual says 12.6 V, but we trust the battery more than their writers.)

The Adamo's advertised operating time is 5 hours, outliving Apple's claims for the MacBook Air by 30 minutes.

According to the manual, the battery weighs in at 489 grams. That's 27% of the Adamo's weight. In comparison, the MacBook Air's battery weighs in at 287 grams, only 21% of the Air's total weight.

You can recycle the battery... in Japan.

Removal of the 128 GB solid state hard drive. The drive is a Thin 128GB uSATA MLC. This particular drive utilizes 16 Samsung 64 gigabit multi-level cell (MLC) flash chips.

• The Samsung chips are K9HCGZ8U1M, manufactured in February of this year.

The drive transmits data through a normal SATA connector. Impressively, the specs listed on the drive indicate a maximum power consumption of only 1.05 watts and an operating shock of 1500G!

The solid state drive's thickest point is the 4mm SATA connector. The rest of the drive is a scant 2.9 mm.

We believe this is an ambient light sensor to support the Adamo's backlit keyboard. Dell has used light sensors in a few other recent notebooks.

The Adamo has no shortage of wireless connectivity possibilities. This machine was the low-end model, so we only received two of the three wireless types.

The missing spot in the middle is for a WWAN WiMax 5530 HSPA Mini Card for AT&T. Even though our machine came without the card, it could be easily added in the future.

• The antennas are routed to the slot and ready to go!

Surprisingly, the Bluetooth board is twice the size of the 802.11n card.

Removal of the 802.11n card and its three antenna cables.

The printed user's guide that came with our Adamo says the machine includes 803.11n Wireless LAN. We're not sure if that's a typo, or something new we don't know about yet.

The wireless cards are attached to the motherboard via a single wide ribbon cable.

The ribbon cable is held securely in place with adhesive, and peeling it up requires some patience.