Centrino 2 hits the streets: The week in laptops

This week was all about the deuce: after a short delay, Intel introduced its Centrino 2 platform late Monday evening. Laptop manufacturers were quick to adopt the new platform, and many took the opportunity to significantly revamp their laptop lines. Piggybacking on the Centrino 2 announcement were IdeaPads and ThinkPads from Lenovo, LifeBooks from Fujitsu, four new VAIO lines from Sony, three business systems from Toshiba, and two biz systems from Acer. HP will be offering the new platform in its recently-announced Pavilion models; Dell, on the other hand, told us there would be no immediate Centrino 2 offerings, but that the company is "committed to offering it on our notebooks in the future."

If you're wondering what the new platform means for you, check out our Centrino 2 explainer.

In Reviews this week, we had a look at the first Centrino 2 system to hit the Labs: the 16-inch (yes, sixteen) Sony VAIO FW140. We finally got our mitts on the long-awaited MSI Wind, and (but for a few flaws) liked it. And we continued our round-up of off-the-shelf laptops for students with reviews of the Toshiba Satellite L355D-S7815, Sony VAIO NR430, and Toshiba Satellite A305D-S6848.

In other news, Acer officially announced U.S. availability of the Aspire One Netbook; Toshiba showed off some gaming laptops at E3; Dell added a 128GB solid-state drive to its list of laptop options; and AMD's new CEO discussed plans to compete with Intel's Atom chip.

Finally, The Cheapskate found a way to add Bluetooth to your laptop for eight bucks.

Have a great weekend!

[TDG01]

I'm pretty excited about the Centrino 2 release as it coincides nicely with the timing of me picking up a couple of laptops. Interesting enough, nothing from DELL about rolling Centrino 2 into their line up.