Sonoma, aka the next-generation of Centrino gets official

Yep, Sonoma, aka Intel's next-generation Centrino chipset, got official today. The big deal about
Sonoma, as we've reported before, is that it makes it possible for manufacturers to pack a whole host of fancy new features into laptops, like 533MHz frontside bus, PCI Express, Serial ATA hard drives, 400MHz and 533MHz DDR 2 SDRAM, Intel's Hi-Def Audio, 802.11a/b/g WiFi, and dynamic screen backlight power management (if none of that means much to you, don't worry, it just basically means faster laptops that are less power-hungry). We've heard there are going to be somewhere around 80 or so Sonoma-based laptops announced this month, so far we've heard about ones from
Sony,
BenQ,
Dell, and
Acer, but we're like 99% sure that we'll have news about a few more before the day is done.