Dearth of Centrino notebooks in London tech street

AS WE PROMISED we would, a few weeks ago, we took our paper notebook and pen to Tottenham Court Road, where there's a multitude of shops selling PCs, just to see how the cookie's crumbling in the Centrino notebook space.

We have to confess we were rather surprised to see so few models sporting the famous Intel kite mark, as we trudged from the crossroads with Oxford Street up to the crossroads at Euston Road, where there's a huge PC World megastore.

See a map of this area of London here.

There weren't very many signs that pricing on the notebooks we saw was taking a tumble.

At MicroAnvika, the firm was pushing Sony VAIO Centrino notebooks - the Z1RSP at £1996 including tax, and the TR1MP at £1799 including tax. While there were two other Centrino machines for sale in MicroAnvika - a Toshiba Satellite Pro for £983 inclusive, and an NEC Versa at £1299 inclusive, both these machines were ex demo machines. The TR1MP from Sony uses an ultra low voltage Pentium M 900, has a 10.4-inch TFT screen, speakers, 256MB memory, and a 30GB hard drive.

And then we had a fair old walk past many shops selling notebooks until we saw a Centrino again. In fact, we had to walk right up to PC World, opposite Warren Street tube to notice any other Centrino models.

PC World was also selling the Sony TR1MP, for £1799.99 inclusive, but also had two models of its own brand Advent Centrino 7030s. And here was a surprise. The advert on one showed a 1.3GHz Pentium M with a 14.1-inch screen selling for $999, while just round the corner there was an Advent 7030 sporting a Pentium M at 1.5GHz for $999. The specs were identical, except that the 1.3GHz box had less memory than the 1.5GHz box. We asked an assistant about this. He said that the prices of the 1.3GHz 7030 were due to fall, and he thought the tags had just not been changed yet.

This would square with Intel roadmaps which show that the 1.3GHz Pentium M is not long for this world. But it's also interesting to us that PC World has to show the frequency of this chip, despite the fact the notebooks aren't sold on the freqency.

We overheard a conversation between a shopper and a sales assistant. She was looking at a Celeron based machine and asking what was the difference between this and an Athlon based machine. The salesman explained that what she was buying here was the "brains of the machine". The Celeron, he added, is the very low end microprocessor, while for the same price she could have the vastly more powerful AMD chip. The shopper was quiet for a few seconds, and then started asking about Apple notebooks...

Back to Centrinos. We understand that Intel is preparing a big consumer push for these machines soon. Does the dearth of machines for sale in what's still London's High Tech Street mean that the shops are all clearing the decks for new machines? Or is there another reason? Inquiring minds want to know. µ

See Also
Panasonic Centrino machine a lightweight heavyweight
Intel's Centrino: is the strategy paying off?