Alienware has thin and light Sentia m3200

SINCE INTEL introduced the Sonoma back in January, things are not as they used to be in notebook business. Usually you expected new designs in late Q3 or early Q4 to be able to ship some of those machines before Canadian and American Thanksgiving and Yule. But Intel's schedule has been pretty different this year.

Alienware took some time but now it's finally ready to release its new Sentia m3200. We played with a previous version based on Dothan CPUs and we liked that. The Sentia m3200 is suppose to weight only 4lbs, (1.81kg). It features 12.1-inch wide screen supporting 1280x800 resolution, uses the i915G chipset and wireless LAN 02.11a/b/g and comes with a distinctive Alienware design.

This new Sentia can now work with up to 100GB 7200 RPM drives but you could get these drives even in the old Sentia. Alienware finally decided to include Bluetooth support, something that was missing from the old machines. This Sentia m3200 has a four in one media card controller and good old Instant On button is still here.

That lets you boot into Linux that supports many different media files within seconds. The second button that clocks your CPU slower and saves energy is still there too.

It's a travellers' machine as it's not heavy and has all you need, but we'd will still like to see a better graphics card to be able to play at least some games. We would like to see an Nvidia or ATI card.

The cheapest unit costs £999 including VAT but excluding delivery although you can pay much more, depending on the components you choose. It's available with Alienfinance mode but you want to check that on their web page. The one we saw is scheduled for a January 12th delivery. µ

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