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Portables Wireless Networking Hardware

Centrino Laptops Reviewed 236

Posted by Hemos from the wireless-machine-run dept.
Jeff Mancuso writes "CNET seems to be the first out with full reviews of the new Centrino Pentium M laptops. The performance looks solid, the features are great, designs are thin and battery life runs up to 4-7 hours on these machines." Yeah, I had hoped that we would make it on the review list, but alas, no such luck. Nice looking machines, though.
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Centrino Laptops Reviewed More

Centrino Laptops Reviewed

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  • The Centrino logo is awful though... God.
    • I was disappointed by the logo...

      Even more disappointing was the marketing spiel. I mean if you're gonna give an interview to ZDNet on the new initiative on which your company is betting its mobile division, you'd think they'd give him someone that can answer his questions in a clear, articulated manner, and not just continually steer him back to her marketing presentation on every question and comment.

      I am not impressed.

  • Damn it (Score:5, Funny)

    by Toasty16 ( 586358 ) on Wednesday March 12, 2003 @11:35AM (#5493967) Homepage
    The Centrinos are out and I had to buy a Dell Inspiron 8200 with a P4-M 1.80Ghz last Friday. I hate technology ;-)
  • Probably had to sacrifice power for battery life. This is why I choose an apple portable. I have a powerful chip that is energy efficient so I get fine battery life with no crippled processor. I wonder how hot these things get though.
    • OTOH, Apple Titaniums get quite hot too...
      • Ohh yea very much so. Not as bad as the new 12" AluBooks though. If your wearing pants it really is not that big of an issue unless you dont move it around at all to disperse the heat amungst all the lap
    • Well, it shows the IBM with 416 minutes of battery life, while running a 1.3GHz, 1.5GHz, or 1.6GHz and a 64MB ATI Mobility FireGL. Not too shabby, I say, although it comes with Windows XP Professional, XP Home, 2000, 98 Gold, 98 SE, or NT 4.0 (with Service Pack 6a). Most of our laptops made locally here are getting breanded Linux on them. I buy my stuff domestic.

  • I wonder (Score:1, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    ... why there's no direct link to the article. I mean tomorrow the cnet.com frontpage could have changed completely, couldn't it?

    Anyway here's the 'overview' as they call it:

    http://www.cnet.com/hardware/0-1027-8-20926222-1 .h tml?tag=ld

  • comercial? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by IAR80 ( 598046 )
    Is this a comercial? If so please post the link to the article because I'm to lazzy to browse through CNET.
    • Commercial indeed. Why trust reports from people who are given the hardware. We all know that they would not be getting all the lovely free hardware if they didn't shill, at least a little.

      Slashdot is hardly unbiased, but at least it doesn't shill for hardware companies... yet.

  • link? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 12, 2003 @11:36AM (#5493993)
    Thanks slashdot for providing a link to this fantastic full review!

  • That link won't make sense in the future... (Score:4, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 12, 2003 @11:37AM (#5493995)
    For when this article gets moved off Cnet's front page, here's a direct link [cnet.com].

    And just so you won't mod me up, here's a link to goatse.cx [goatse.cx]

  • Article Link (Score:5, Informative)

    by HaloZero ( 610207 ) <protodeka&gmail,com> on Wednesday March 12, 2003 @11:40AM (#5494026) Homepage
    For you lazy bastards.

    http://computers.cnet.com/hardware/0-1027-8-209262 22-1.html?tag=ld [cnet.com]

    Enjoy. Oh, and, to be honest, I'm happy with my new 12" PowerBook G4 [apple.com] - It does everything I want, and then some. :-D

  • Pentium M? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Undaar ( 210056 ) on Wednesday March 12, 2003 @11:41AM (#5494044) Homepage
    What the hell happened to Pentiums V through CMXCIX?

  • Battery life (Score:5, Informative)

    by tmark ( 230091 ) on Wednesday March 12, 2003 @11:44AM (#5494069)
    Why hasn't it advanced much compared to just about every other technology in a laptop ? To me, low battery life and low weight are THE most important characteristics of any laptop, I might use, but we had laptops running for 2-3 hours 5-7 years ago, which is still where most laptops are at. Here it seems the Centrino ekes out its long life through advances in the CPU, not through better batteries.

    A recent Sony Vaio notebook I just got, while a lovely machine, lasts *maybe* 1 1/2 hours when all the consumption-related options are turned way down. Plug in the wifi card and it's borderline useless.

    So why hasn't battery life advanced significantly ? Are we already at a theoretical limit of battery performance ? Or is battery performance improving, but just managing to keep pace with ever-increasing power-consumption ?

    • Re:Battery life (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Hollinger ( 16202 ) <michael AT hollinger DOT net> on Wednesday March 12, 2003 @11:54AM (#5494178) Homepage Journal
      It's not so much battery technology as power consumption (and waste) of the battery. That huge 16" on some laptops sucks up watts left and right. That new P4-1.X Ghz pulls away power too. Oh, and don't forget about the GPU and the spindles for the drives.

      Out of that list, the three that you could most obviously increase the power efficiency of are the ones where the masses want the latest and greatest. You could make a machine that runs for hours and hours, but it'd have a crappy little i810 graphics chip, and a p3, and a smaller display, which, honestly, is last century's technology, and not as appealing as the new gigahertz monsters.

      My VAIO (6 month old GRX), when running at the "slow" speed of 1.1 Ghz with full backlight and 3Com WiFi X-jack card, runs for 2.5 -> 3 hours, depending on how many packets I fling out to the base station, and how much I pound on the hard drive.

      If you want to know where your battery's going, it's the new "space warmer" feature that comes standard with most laptops.

      • Re:Battery life (Score:2, Informative)

        by tungwaiyip ( 608795 )
        Unfortunately when faced the choice between performance and battery most vendor bias toward performance. I am a programmer spending a lot of time on commute train. 3+ hour is what I demand. I spend more time on text editor and web browser than any other thing I don't really need high speed in that circumstance. Unfortunately with CPU speed turned low (Intel SpeedStep?) I still get only around 2 hours, much less than my PIII.

      • Re:Battery life (Score:2, Informative)

        by xombo ( 628858 )
        My 600 Mhz VAIO only gets about 30-50 min of battery power, just playing mp3's and surfing wireless. With no wireless I get about 1 hour if I am very lucky. I think x86 just plain sucks in terms of power consumption. I got a powerbook now, and it's battery life is about 3.5 hours and that isn't just playing mp3's, that is using the internet, photoshop, VNC, terminal, SSH, chat, etc. I don't see why people put up with Wintel laptops.
        • My primary reason is that I the software I have for Windows, and my choices for most of my apps for college are Linux and Windows. Given the choice, I take XP. If I could have my way, I'd have a TiBook (I own three other Macs that serve me well).

          I'm guessing AMD's new offering might do better. We'll see. If we can get the focus away from performance and to longevity, we'll have great machines. Some year now, it'll happen. My prediciton is that once a device the size of your cell phone can take dictation and parse it into text, we'll start working on power consumption.

    • Re:Battery life (Score:5, Informative)

      by rgmoore ( 133276 ) <glandauer@charter.net> on Wednesday March 12, 2003 @11:55AM (#5494202) Homepage

      There are two reasons that battery life isn't getting better. One is that there's an inherent competetion between improved battery life and improved features. Whenever somebody comes up with an improvement in energy storage, it can be used either to give you more time or to feed more cool stuff, like more powerful processors, extra storage devices, or a nicer screen. The competetion from cool stuff has a tendency to keep the life from improving as much as you might like.

      Equally important, there are serious physical limits to the amount of energy that a battery can hold. For a given mass of battery, the total energy storage is limited by the chemical properties of the materials you can use in the battery. Since those properties are reasonably well known, and people have been making batteries for a couple hundred years now, most of the possible advances have already been made. There just isn't much space for improvement once you've switched to the highest energy materials available. The only way to get radically higher energy density than is currently available is by switching to something other than batteries, like fuel cells.

    • Re:Battery life (Score:5, Informative)

      by larien ( 5608 ) on Wednesday March 12, 2003 @11:58AM (#5494231) Homepage Journal
      Batteries have been around for decades and we probably have eked out most of the performance from them. However, I did read something in the last few days about some advances in lithium batteries [arstechnica.com] which may help out.

      In essence, batteries use well known chemistry/physics which we know a lot more about than making CPUs. Added to this, there are certain hard limits in this based on the chemistry/physics involved. We're probably already fairly near them using current battery techniques. The advances above may help out, but until they've delivered, we're stuck at current battery technology.

      To be honest, another approach should be to make CPUs equivalent to 500MHz PIIs; it's enough for most things (word processing, email) and should be able to be designed at a very low power consumption.

    • More complicated processor, more transistors, more energy burned.

      More bitblt activity and multimedia display, more energy burned.

      More pixels on screen, more energy burned.

      More radio signal activity, more energy burned.

      When people realize this, laptop speeds will go down to usable levels (1GHz will play DivX movies fine, and that's probably the most intensive thing you could possibly do well on a laptop). Until then, expect those laptops to continue tacking on more battery burning "features."

      • Re:Battery life (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Xerithane ( 13482 ) <xerithane.nerdfarm@org> on Wednesday March 12, 2003 @12:32PM (#5494522) Homepage Journal
        When people realize this, laptop speeds will go down to usable levels (1GHz will play DivX movies fine, and that's probably the most intensive thing you could possibly do well on a laptop). Until then, expect those laptops to continue tacking on more battery burning "features."

        Well, what about people who do realize this. They realize that is what PDAs are for and such, and for a laptop they do want a powerhouse. I want a laptop that can run my entire development environment, quick compiles, while listening to mp3s and when I'm finished, reboot into windows and play some warcraft 3.

        Remember, not everybody feels the same way as you. This is why their is market diversity.

    • Underclocking? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Syncdata ( 596941 ) on Wednesday March 12, 2003 @12:25PM (#5494460) Journal
      I've not part of the over clocking scene, nor the laptop scene, so I wouldn't know one way or the other, but would it be possible to take an already good laptop (battery life wise) such as one of these models with the centrino, and underclock it? I'd love a laptop, but I really only want one to access email and putz around with excel files on the move.
      Is it even possible to jimjam with the bios settings, and lower the performance of the CPU? Would that even have an effect on battery life?

      • Re:Underclocking? (Score:4, Insightful)

        by addaon ( 41825 ) <addaon+slashdot.gmail@com> on Wednesday March 12, 2003 @12:43PM (#5494615)
        You can do it in software on the Centrinos, I'm sure. On the other hand, with a reasonably well-designed laptop (centrino, g3, transmeta) you'll hit diminishing returns quickly. Most of these processors use between 3W and 7W of power (don't know centrino's power draw off the top of my head). Even if you manage to cut that to 1W, a 6W difference makes little difference when your monitor draws 8W-12W, your harddrive draws 2W, and even your ram and chpset draw a couple of watts between them. The difference doesn't hurt, but the performance difference probably begins to outweigh the battery life difference. A 100% performance decrease (conceptually, if we were to use a multiplier of zero on the processor) would probably correspond to a 20% battery life increase at most.
        • A 100% performance decrease (conceptually, if we were to use a multiplier of zero on the processor) would probably correspond to a 20% battery life increase at most.

          In terms of minutes that a computer can be turned on, sure.

          In practical terms, however, a 100% performance decrease effectively decreases the usable battery time by 100% too, because the battery will be depleted by the time any computation can be completed.

      • My NEC Versa Aptitude does this automatically - unhook the power and it drops from a PIII 750 to a ~PIII 500. Battery life is a tad under 3 hours in X, or a tad over in the CLI :o) Two batteries get me accross the atlantic - which is why I plan not to upgrade until the thing dies. It has done 2 years and 90,000 miles so far with no sign of that happening yet though!

    • Re:Battery life (Score:4, Insightful)

      by timeOday ( 582209 ) on Wednesday March 12, 2003 @12:53PM (#5494709)
      Why don't you take a look at the links? The IBM machine tested at 7 hours!

      As for battery technology, slashdot has had several articles on fuel cells. (Whether these can strictly be called "batteries" we'll leave to the pedants.) Those are supposed to hit the market within a year.

    • Re:Battery life (Score:3, Interesting)

      by jhines0042 ( 184217 )
      Two words: Transmeta Processor.

      My new Fujitsu Lifebook P-2000 notebook is a wonderful machine. With the extended main battery I was able to watch all of the Two Towers (single disk 3 hour version) before the battery died.

      Take out the DVD drive and put in the second battery and I can listen to MP3s for 10 hours on battery.

      Ok, so its not the most powerful processor in the world, but it does allow me to play games, so far I've played Civ III for 2.5 hours and still had 50% battery life left. I'm going to try out Homeworld soon, I'll let you know.

    • Once I read an article by a chemical engineer from a major battery power. He said they are lucky to improve capacity by 5% a year on average. If batteries were improving like CPUs, regular AAs could store energy of a nuke.
    • Why hasn't it advanced much compared to just about every other technology in a laptop

      Because the marketplace is not dominated by the low-weight/small crowd. The marketplace wants cheap, powerful and reasonably luggable. If the market cared as much about weight and size as you do, Transmeta would have actual hope.
  • These only support the weaker kind of WiFi -- 802.11b.

    They will have 802.11g which is both a+b (a is faster speeds) in June according to stuff I've read before.

    So if you're interested, remember that.

  • Target market dissonance? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by lavalyn ( 649886 ) on Wednesday March 12, 2003 @11:47AM (#5494098) Homepage Journal
    It appears the Centrino is a processor that actually could be practical, conserving battery power at the expense of computing power. As such, the market is of people that want more battery time, and are going to sacrifice computing power to do so.

    Why do these laptops then contain such battery burning parts as large screens, CDRW/DVD drives, and weigh as much as 7lb?

    When I saw the Sony Picturebook with Transmeta Crusoe processor, I was drooling. Not because it was a Crusoe processor, but because it was a computer that could do what mobile people need it to do, and do it for a long time, and be unobtrusive enough to put in my jacket pocket.

    If you're going to get a portable computer but you're always going to be plugged in when using it, get a cheap ECS Desknote that doesn't come with a battery. If you worry a bit about battery time, get a normal mobile Pentium IV or Mobile Athlon. If you're insane about battery life, get a Crusoe. I don't see the middle ground between the last two.
    • I have a Sony Picturebook. I love it. It lives in my shoulder bag, and goes everywhere with me. It would be nice if it was a bit lighter, a bit faster, ran something other than WinXP... And if it lasted longer than two hours. Now that I'm working again, I think it's time to buy the extended battery.
      • I had a picture book. Loved it. 3 hours on extended battery, ran linux (with camera support), and was generally just a great machine. Then it exploded. In lots of blue sparks. In the middle of a conference call. Needless to say, I bought a mac. Which, come to think of it, just died yesterday, the day before my thesis is due. (Yes, I'm reading /. instead of doing my thesis.) Why don't people believe that I treat my laptops well?

    • I think the middle ground between the Pentium 4 and the Crusoe is high performance and reasonable battery life. By one speed test I read about (I think PC World's), a 1.6 GHz Pentium M-based notebook surpassed a 2.5 GHz Pentium 4 desktop in some benchmarks.

      The Pentium M is really just a much-improved Pentium 3.. 400 MHz FSB, 1 MB on-die cache, and the P4's better branch prediction. All with a better life of up to 7 hours. If you want real performance and can do only 5 - 7 hrs instead of 10 - 12, the Pentium M is much more appealing than anything Transmeta has out right now.

      I think once PC manufacturers "get it," we'll start seeing more small, 1" thick, yet powerful notebooks, like IBM's new T, with 4 - 5 hrs battery life. Apple's huge hardware lead in the mobile market will be significantly diminished by Intel's (and AMD's, for that matter) new offering. Fortunately, I prefer my iBook for other reasons, like the OS.

      • Why do people want "High Performance" on a laptop on the go?

        Business users? I can't see them using more than a Bluetooth connection to a VPN, doing email and word processing. Crusoe will fit their bill just as well as anything AMD or Intel can make right now.

        Gamers? Centrino isn't the answer, a blazing (in more than one sense of the word) fast desktop processor on a lap with a mobile 3d accelerator, if any laptop could suffice.

        A portable MP3 unit with a little bit more intelligence? Go get a Transmeta Crusoe, it'll save your shoulders more in the long run.

  • Nice reviews (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Alcimedes ( 398213 ) on Wednesday March 12, 2003 @11:49AM (#5494122)
    After actually READING the reviews, i just wanted to post a few comments.

    first, (as i type this on a G4 PB) it looks like Intel has done a great job with these chips. those battery life stats were just marketing fluff, looks like they're real. (although the 7 hour IBM had a "special" order battery with it that stuck out an inch from the back).

    it's good to see the Windows world get some laptops that are actually focusing on what makes a laptop worthwhile, weight and battery life. the alienware machines are OK i guess, but suck as a true laptop IMO.

    in any case, these chips look like a real improvement to both performance and to the Intel mindset. i'm happy to see them start working towards real world benefits in their chips over marketing hype and lame numbers games.

    • but suck as a true laptop IMO

      I want enough balls to run JDeveloper, an Oracle instance and JBoss doing a full compile/run/debug cycle for 10 hours without complaint. That, and several other common apps in the background, a LOT of disk and RAM and a CD burner. 99 days out of 100 the longest I actually carry the thing is from my office to the back seat of my car. I do this every working day and I could care less if it weights 7-8 pounds. The only time I need the battery is while traveling or stuck in a meeting. Real computing on a plane is hopeless unless you're in 1st class and meetings don't last long enough to kill the batts.

      Too heavy? PDAs do email just fine.

      I really don't get these people that whine about weight/size. There are thin 2-3lb laptops all over the place. I won't have anything to do with them but I see them often enough. What is the problem? Does it surprise you to discover that .5" and 2.5lbs with 1076x768 won't replace your desktop? Well no sh*t Sherlock!

  • Hey, stupid! (Score:5, Funny)

    by barspin ( 585641 ) on Wednesday March 12, 2003 @11:50AM (#5494146)
    Yeah, I had hoped that we would make it on the review list, but alas, no such luck. Nice looking machines, though.

    This will not get you a review unit any sooner. Review units are sent to news sites that actually test machines; not to a "news" site that would use the machine and then post a three-sentence blurb on, which would be followed by 400 comments about goatse.cx and SOVIET RUSSIA, and one on-topic post complaining about the price of the product reviewed.

    Call this flamebait, troll, whatever, but it's reality: slashdot isn't classified in the realm of a legitimate news site. It's a BBS, plain and simple.

    In summary: go buy your own fucking laptop, Hemos.

  • AMD's answer: Mobile athlons with 1watt(!) (Score:5, Informative)

    by egghat ( 73643 ) on Wednesday March 12, 2003 @11:50AM (#5494148) Homepage
    12 new Athlon Mobile models, which will go down to 1 volt core voltage and use not more than 1 watt (!).

    Check here [amd.com]

    The 1 watt number is from a Heise article [heise.de].

    Bye egghat.

  • weight? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Schwamm ( 513960 ) <laurie_riley@[ ]oo.com ['yah' in gap]> on Wednesday March 12, 2003 @11:52AM (#5494156) Homepage
    why is it in reviews that the reviewers can't seem to bother to mention the weights of the laptops? i don't want to be toting around a seven pound beast.
    • Did you bother reading the actual reviews? Weights are listed on the "Design" page for each laptop.
    • why is it in reviews that the reviewers can't seem to bother to mention the weights of the laptops? i don't want to be toting around a seven pound beast.

      Do you know how to read?
      "How does seven hours of battery life, great performance, and a 5.4-pound weight sound to you? That's what we thought." [cnet.com]

  • Centrino looks great (Score:4, Interesting)

    by stratjakt ( 596332 ) on Wednesday March 12, 2003 @11:54AM (#5494186) Journal
    Seems Intel found a way to dramatically lower power consumption and heat without sacrificing too much CPU power.

    I cant wait until we can get flex-atx or something like miniitx boards designed for these centrinos.

    I want to put together little console-ish media players and gaming machines to plug into the TV, and VIA Edens offerings so far are just a little to gutless, and Shuttles spacewalker boards are great, but screaming CPU and case fans wont cut it.

    I wonder how these things would cluster (yeah, imagine a beow...). Possibilities for my own personal little server farm without having to run another 150 amps of service to my PC room, and wont deafen me (a beowulf cluster of fans I dont need).

  • anandtech review (Score:5, Informative)

    by adpowers ( 153922 ) on Wednesday March 12, 2003 @12:13PM (#5494350)
    Anandtech also has their review [anandtech.com] up.
  • The centrino have been entirely developed in Israel [israel21c.org] under strict secrecy.

  • what accounts for the performance differences? (Score:3, Informative)

    by e4liberty ( 537089 ) on Wednesday March 12, 2003 @12:17PM (#5494389)

    The performance of these machines varies quite a bit. The top performers are described and benchmark results are here [cnet.com].

    What accounts for this range of performance. All four machines have the same processor, clock, memory speed, bridge chip, GPU, disk speed, etc.:

    Windows XP Professional; 1.6GHz Intel Pentium M; 512MB DDR SDRAM 266MHz; ATI Mobility Radeon 9000 32MB; [many]GB 5,400rpm [drive]

    Is it all in the firmware settings?

    • I've seen many Cnet reviews and wondered this myself. I'm convinced that Cnet caters to its advertisers when doing product reviews. Who knows what they could have done to get the numbers to work in their favor. Ever notice all the extra applications that vendors tend to install with new systems, that boot up with Windows and stay in memory? I wouldn't be surprised if Cnet left those running.

      I've noticed similar practices on ZDnet. These guys will subtract 3 points because they don't like the media player (or CD writing software, or MP3 manager, etc.) that the notebook ships with. They seem to forget that they're judging hardware, not software.

  • BusinessWeek on the new Centrino (Score:5, Insightful)

    by andy1307 ( 656570 ) on Wednesday March 12, 2003 @12:17PM (#5494395)
    This is from the BusinessWeek subscription site.

    Laptop Makers Don't Want This Intel Inside The new Centrino comes with a disappointing wireless chip

    Too bad PC makers don't agree. Dell Computer Corp. (DELL ), Hewlett-Packard Co. (HPQ ), and other top manufacturers are eager to harness the extra power and efficiency of the new Pentium, but they are underwhelmed by Intel's wireless technology, which they say transmits data more slowly than those of rivals such as Broadcom (BRCM ).

    What's more, notebook manufacturers perceive an ulterior motive behind Intel's Centrino launch. While Otellini says Intel is combining features in one package "so everything works [well] together," some PC makers fear Intel could boost prices if it were to become the sole supplier for most of a notebook's innards. And even if Intel didn't raise prices, PC makers say they'd prefer to continue buying components from numerous suppliers so they can better set themselves apart from competitors.

  • ibook vs these new guys (Score:5, Interesting)

    by ilsie ( 227381 ) on Wednesday March 12, 2003 @12:42PM (#5494608)
    I have to say, being a lifelong Windows user (I had a stint with Macs briefly, 10 years ago in high school yearbook class, pagemaker and what not) I was getting quite fed up with my 9 pound, 1 hour, Sony Vaio AMD laptop. So last week I sold it and went out and bought a sleek little 12" ibook. Best purchase I've ever made. After the initial learning curve with OS X (why the heck isnt Ctrl+C working? Wait, what's this weird little symbol key?) I am really digging the ibook. It's so beautiful, has great battery life, and does everything I'd ever need in a laptop. I love that I can ssh into my colo box without having to download putty. Little stuff like that.

    Anyways, long story short, if I had to do it again now with all these T&L windows laptops out, I would still go with the ibook.
  • Does anyone know when Transmeta will have more info about the Astro? It made a splash and seems to have just gone away. I can't even find mention of it on their website.

    Seems like it could compete with the Pentium-M if/when it comes out.


  • Interesting stuff. This seems like a pretty nice step up from my current system. Question, would we be able to install linux onto these systems? (Will the generic pentium drivers, ... work) or do all of the drivers still need to be written?

  • Laptop comment metareview (Score:4, Funny)

    by foxtrot ( 14140 ) on Wednesday March 12, 2003 @03:11PM (#5495919)
    Seems there are two sorts of common comments that show up when Slashdot mentions a laptop:

    • They're too heavy! Make them lighter!
    • Battery life sucks! Make the batteries bigger!


    Well, hard disks aren't getting any lighter, CD-ROMs aren't getting much lighter, keyboards're probably at the ragged edge of weight/reliability, TFT screens only get so light, and so, what's left?

    Batteries.

    Why's laptop battery life suck? Because as batteries get better they use less of them to make the laptop lighter. Why are laptops so heavy? Because if the batteries were any lighter, they'd have even less power...

    I want a nice thick ten or fifteen pound laptop that's got enough battery life to last all day and enough reinforcement under the hood that I can thump users upside the head with it. Lightweight's overrated.

  • It's a gimmick (Score:2, Informative)

    by ThresherGDI ( 650604 )
    Centrino is a marketing gimmick and a gimmick only. I'm sure the parts are just fine, but the whole setup is a marketing ploy.

    Each of the seperate parts of Centrino are very good. The new processor should do wonders for battery life. The new wireless solution should be halfway decent, but it's a commodity part. The motherboard should be solid, as usual for intel. Individually, these parts are worth more than their sum.

    In order to have the Centrino label, the OEM must use the specified Intel mobo, the intel WiFi part, and the Pentium M. If you have a large, paranoid company like mine, you do NOT want the WiFi part. Thankfully, this part is optional, but the computer can no longer be marketed as a Centrino and the OEM loses a certain amount of co-marketing dollars. This is bad for the OEM, okay for the end user (they get what they want), and bad for intel since they don't get to capitalize on all the marketing dollars they spent huckstering the Centrino name.

    For a personal user, say that I want 802.11g or a different video subsystem. If I change out the WiFi portion, the product is no longer Centrino. From my understanding, intel is also taking this stance on using anything other than the included intel graphics subsystem, so if I need a more powerful graphics solution (for games, CAD, 3D rendering, etc) I lose the Centrino label. It is also not clear that you can even USE non-intel graphics. The Register mentioned that ATi was denied a license. Once again, this is bad for the OEM, good for the customer, bad for intel.

    The only time this pays off for intel or the OEM is if the end user buys a stock Centrino unit. That may be a considerable number of people. But my bet is that there are plenty more individuals or corporate customers that only want a part of the package. Additionally, there will be many individuals that will be confused by the new label and not understand that there are other choices available that will give them either more power, or less if that's what they need.

    So, what was the point of putting this package together in the first place? It limits choice, it doesn't pay off in many situations, and it will confuse the customer.

    I guess intel figures if they can establish a brand that encompasses the guts of a laptop, they can control the laptop market. People will ask for a Centrino the way that they ask for Pentiums, regardless of their true merits.

    Why doesn't intel just slap a chassis and LCD on them and be done with it? They seem intent on making laptops. There will be little or no product variation between OEMS.

  • Advertisement! (Score:3, Insightful)

    by tekunokurato ( 531385 ) <jackphelps@gmail.com> on Wednesday March 12, 2003 @06:10PM (#5498234) Homepage
    Christ, this is not a product review, it's a bloody advertisement. Where's the criticism? Where's the testing? The only person we hear from is the salesperson!
  • Just like MSN, they have a media blitz going on. I chatted with a presenter at the NY Hilton, and he said that that Centrino is a new wireless technology that is based on 802.11.

    "Do they have a PCMCIA card yet?"
    "No, but they expect to soon."

    Then I read this. You can also try out free 802.11 at 10 [mcdwireless.com] different McDonald's locations in NYC with the purchase of a Big Mac or McNuggets.

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