Intel's notebook strategy causing terrible muddle all round

(Here's the Streetmap UK reference See the little plot between Gower St and Gower Place? That's where MI5 used to be but they've knocked it down and digging out the foundations as we speak.)

Just south of Goodge Street underground station, further down Tottenham Court Road, you will find a multitude of electronics traders peddling various wares to the interested.

And bang opposite Warren Street tube station, at the top of Tottenham Court Road is a massive branch of PC World, owned by the Dixons Group, occupying the space that a former furniture shop, Maples, had for years.

We wanted to buy a notebook for the INQUIRER, so we've wandered up and down the road several times in the last 10 days, looking at the prices and listening carefully to the conversations sales assistants have with would be customers.

Prices vary wildly and widely. For example, at PC World, a Sony Vaio R600 HMPD, which has a 1.2GHz Pentium III-M chip is listed at £1750 or so, including VAT. Last week, the same model was selling in Micro Anvika for £1600, and next door at Gultronics we were quoted a price of £1599 last week, although by yesterday it had fallen to £1550.

Resellers we've talked to say this particular model costs them £1400 plus VAT, on which they're supposed to stick their own margin...

Many of the models at PC World are "desknote" machines, that is to say they have desktop CPUs inside a notebook chassis. There are particularly good deals on 2.8GHz Pentium 4 machines that use a desktop CPU rather than the Pentium 4M.

We overheard a conversation between one customer at PC World and a salesman there. She wanted a machine with a Pentium 4M but she was told that Intel's "Speedstep" technology only gave an extra 10 per cent of battery life and didn't make a big difference to the heat generated either.

Some wag at Micro Anvika said he had heard Intel was about to release a new technology called "Centrino", which he understood performed "better" than the Transmeta, AMD mobile, and Intel mobile chips. The salesman replied that, yes, it probably would be a "better" technology than those currently available in his shop, but when machines were released they would cost an extra £1000.

So the whole point is this. By April, Intel will have five different CPUs that are built into notebooks - the Centrino/Banias chips, the Pentium 4 desktop CPUs, the the Pentium 4M notebook CPUs, the Celeron mobile chips, and the rather nice Pentium III M processors. By autumn, Intel will have six CPUs that go into notebooks - it will release Celeron P4 desktop processors intended for this slug of the market.

As the undoubted leader in PC technology, we wonder whether Intel could please put into the clearest of English which CPU is best for notebooks. Or is that a positioning statement too far? µ