Sony claims Centrino 2 first

AT A UK press event last week Sonī Kabushiki kaisha unveiled Sony's Montevina offerings to an unsuspecting room full of UK journos, with a bold and unbashful claim of being the very first out of the starting gate with Centrino 2.

This announcement took us back a tad, seeing as we'd already personally heard from Lenovo and Rock earlier in the week over their offerings. We queried the outlandish statement, which first came to light in a presentation, with the slide below presented as evidence. Robbie Duncan, the Sony consumer product manager responded simply with the claim that the Intel embargo ran out on 8:00pm on the 15^th. At 8:01 Sony began shipping the laptops.

We challenged this once more, only this time with the two manufacturers we've heard from of late. They both confirmed via email that they’ve only just announced but aren’t actually shipping until August, not exactly what we all first thought. It looks like Sony will be the alpha-males here after all.

This is surprising when others are making such as song and dance over their laptops. Perhaps it was all just that, smoke and mirrors with a big spin knowing full well that the new Vaios would be in your grubby little mitts way before anyone elses.

Sony tried to emphasise that its laptops were all about Work and Play, to that end we were all packed away with Mars bars. Also in the press pack was a Sony Vaio branded gadget for locating Wi-Fi hotspots, which only worked with 802.11 a, b and g – despite the Centrino 2 chipset have 802.11n on-board. Don’t ya just love irony µ