Intel's next Centrino chipset was barely announced last night and already, there is a flurry of news about which notebooks are receiving the chip-brain transplant, Frankenstein-style.
Fujitsu, Toshiba, Lenovo, and Sony all announced their Centrino laptop builds this morning and it turns out that a few of them might be actually interesting.
Since Intel's second-generation Core 2 Duo processor is coming along for the Centrino ride (as well as the new GMA X4500 graphics chipset), we'll be seeing a few embedded high-end features such as Blu-ray optical drives, rugged material casings, and GPS built in. On the purely aesthetic side, the companies clearly want to catch the thin-and-light gravy train of the mini-note market with spit-shine blacks and cool-looking cases.
Let's take a look at the deluge:
Fujitsu
Fujitsu released six new LifeBook notebooks, including the A6210
notebook that includes a 15.4-inch LCD, optional Blu-ray drive, HDMI
port, and their version of the gesture-enabled touchpad. Nothing truly new there, except that it's also supposed to look pretty slick for a
Fujitsu lappie, with a new glossy case. Looks just OK to me.
But the story might be the two new builds of convertible tablet PCs, the T5010 and the T1010, which come with 13.3-inch displays at the
4.5-5.3 lb. range. The stronger chipset will surely improve the overall performance (and Fujitsu already makes pretty good tablets), but we were hoping that they'd also improve the brightness of their displays, which have proven a bit dim in the past. And so it is: Both include a backlit-LED screen for the first time.
Sony
The everything-but-the-kitchen sink company of consumer electronics has a stylish, thin, and easily portable notebook called the Z series, and it looks sexy as hell. But do you know what's not sexy? Paying almost
$2,000 for a laptop with a 13.1" screen.
Still, the 2.26Ghz to 2.53Ghz notebook is one of the new laptops that will be unleashed on the general public as an appetizing, full-featured alternative to the mini-notes. It includes a carbon-fiber casing (with shock protection), weighs only 3.42 lbs. (close to Eee-size)
and will be available in a dual channel 128 GB solid-state drive model.
This one also has a Blu-ray option and promises up to six hours of battery life. The latter is usually the portable's Achilles, so we'll see about that.
Toshiba
The Satellite Pro S300, the Tecra M10, and Tecra A10 are Toshiba’s main new
Centrino laptops and all are business oriented. Code word: Boring.
Well, mostly. The Pro S300 features the new Intel Graphics Media
Accelerator 4500MHD that pumps up the graphics performance, and it comes with a Sleep-and-Charge USB port that allows you to charge your gadgets through the laptop even when it's idle. It also has a webcam with a business card reader. Fun!
Built for the IT set, the Tecras include vPro technology for remote management.
Lenovo
Lenovo was the biggest culprit of the deluge of laptop news -- nine new
ThinkPad models in all, including three brand-new SL small-business series, plus updates to the R, T, and W series. Alphabet soup gone wrong.
The SL series include optional GPS and Blu-ray recordable drives, and one of the size options is a nice 13.3-inch size, with 4500 or 128MB Nvdia
GeForce 9300 graphics.
Finally, the X series has a nice wide case, a comfortably large keyboard,
WWAN, GPS, and a 64GB solid-state drive option. The efficiency of the
Centrino chip is also being used for the battery here -- almost 9 hours max is promised.
Sources: Toshiba, Sony, Lenovo, Fujitsu
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