Intel kicks off Santa Rosa launch

THE UK ARM of Intel hired the whole of a coffee bar here in the City this morning, with a bevy of OEMs showing off their wares.

Intel is doing a similar thing in the US later today, which is presumably why the Wall Street Journal, as usual, was able to pre-empt that introduction.

Arun Shenoy, who heads up the notebook division here, confirmed what the world+dog knows already, that notebooks are selling like billy-o.

Shenoy said the Centrino Pros launched today were aimed at the business market, and claimed it had extended battery life. Intel is bringing the Vpro features for desktops into notebook computers. Being able to manage computers in an enterprise fashion was important, he said.

As large corporations seem very prone to losing notebooks with peoples' data on them, perhaps all the guilty IT managers will be able to make use of the security features Intel claims Santa Rosa is offering.

I guess you were wondering what happened to David Ross from hexus.net? Well he's here, here's a snap of him outside the demo bubble down the stairs from the coffee bar.

The bad news for Intel is that though a whole load of people are launching notebooks using the Santa Rosa stuff today, including Dell, the Great Satan of Hardware is also launching a notebook using an AMD Turion microprocessor.

But we're pretty sure that AMD won't have whole gaggles of people flying around on rollerblades, like Intel UK has here in the Broadgate Arena, just behind the ugly UBS building.

Intel claims there are 230 different models launching including Acer, Lenovo and HP. We'll check out the battery claims. Somehow we get a feeling of deja entendu about this. µ