Santa Rosa: Crave goes hands on with the new Centrino

Good news laptop fans, we've got a Santa Rosa laptop, and we've been putting it through its paces for the last few days. What is it? Why should you care? Read on to find out!

Santa Rosa is the codename for the latest iteration of Intel's Centrino platform. It's been in development for several years now under the codename Santa Rosa, but will be known as Centrino Duo in consumer laptops, or as Centrino Pro for business machines.

Nerdy as it may sound, this is a pretty big deal. The original Centrino platform very much revolutionised the laptop market in 2003 by promoting the message of long battery life and ubiquitous wireless connectivity. It's arguably the reason millions of you can sit in a Starbucks sipping macchiatos and catching up on emails. Without it, you'd probably be running around boasting about how wonderful your desk-bound 5.2GHz Pentium 9 is, not caring about Wi-Fi or battery life.

Santa Rosa improves on its predecessor by bringing several innovations to the table. Unlike many of our rivals, we've been testing them on a real Santa Rosa laptop and can now tell you, exclusively, how this will (or won't) benefit you. With numbers and everything.

Update: A full review of a Santa Rosa laptop is now live.

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