Centrino PCs arrive early

A range of laptop PCs based on Intel's Centrino technology made a surprise early appearance at the Intel Developer Forum last week - almost a month before their official 12 March launch.

The sleek products offer wireless LAN capabilities and long battery life as standard, as well as subtle design tweaks that will help make them desirable to firms seeking thin, lightweight PCs.

Toshiba showed two products, one a Portégé laptop and the other a larger design for workstation tasks. Also on display were products from Samsung, Gateway, FIC, Asus and Compaq. The 1in-thick FIC product uses a 9.5mm CD/DVD drive rather than the usual 12.7mm and has a flat, broad battery that uses prismatic cell technology. The system also uses Remote Heat Exchange - a way of removing heat from the system to ensure cool running.

Gregory Jones, a member of Intel's Centrino technical design team, said the laptops should cost from under $2,000 (about £1,300) and run between five-and-a-half to six hours on a single battery charge under normal working conditions.

Laptops could last even longer using a screen technology called low temperature poly-silicon (LTPS) that Intel is helping to develop. The chip maker has a stake in Taiwanese startup Toppoly which, like Toshiba and Acer, plans to manufacture the panels. LTPS allows screens to offer higher resolutions but uses less power than conventional LCD TFT screens. This will add significant battery life to laptops, as screens currently take up around a third of battery capacity.

"At first there will be about a 10 percent price premium to be paid for LTPS but eventually it will be cheaper than today's TFTs," predicted David Chung, senior display manager at Intel's Mobile Platform Architecture division. "When it comes to people wanting higher resolutions further down the road, it will have to be LTPS," he added.

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