Photos: Intel launches Centrino Pro

Intel built this dome in the City of London's Broadgate Arena to demonstrate the first notebooks that will use its Centrino Pro processor, chipset and wireless. The event, held on Wednesday morning, was attended by key Intel executives and dozens of IT managers interested in developing their mobile strategies.

A plentiful supply of vitamin C awakened attendees before Intel's business director Arun Shenoy formally launched the Centrino Pro mobile platform with a short and snappy PowerPoint presentation. Formal events concluded when Shenoy drew a business card at random from a hat, rewarding one IT manager with the prize of a notebook fitted with the new Centrino Pro chipset.

HP was keen to demonstrate a range of its Centrino Pro-based systems as it announced the addition of five new enterprise models to its portfolio. Business development manager Steve Gales said the major benefit of Centrino Pro was its improved manageability, which means IT managers can troubleshoot PCs wirelessly as well as over wired connections. Gales also claimed that battery life on Centrino Pro-based machines would be boosted by around half an hour as a result of the power-saving abilities in the chipset. Processing power would also increase, although the real performance gains were brought about by the introduction of the Core 2 Duo, he said.

Pictured: HP's 6910, which is due for release at the end of May (right), NEC's Versa model (centre) and another one of HP's growing notebook range (left).

LG was happy to provide two machines to demonstrate Turbo Memory, which devotes 512MB or 1GB of Nand flash memory to holding system files and other data that the operating system requires at start-up, restoring from sleep or during application switches. Intel claims Turbo Memory, formerly known by the code name Robson, can more than halve application load and wake-from-sleep times.

This Fujitsu Siemens kit was being used to demonstrate Intel's Active Management Technology (AMT), which now includes the ability to troubleshoot PCs wirelessly. AMT could prove particularly useful for businesses with a large number of mobile workers.