JP
E-Lead’s Noahpad UMPC showed up at CES 2008 with an Eee-alike casing, super-swivelling hinge and a dual-touchpad interface that recognised gestures and also typing using the printed key layout. It’s finally made it into the hands of UMPC Fever, and it looks like they’ve not even waited until they drove home in order to shoot the unboxing video.
Check out the E-Lead Noahpad unboxing video after the cut
Running Windows XP on a VIA C7-M processor, the Noahpad EL-460 has a 7-inch LED-backlit screen, 512MB of RAM, a 30GB 1.8-inch hard-drive and webcam. Connectivity includes WiFi b/g, Bluetooth 2.0 and optional 3.5G WWAN modem.
Most interesting, though, is the combination of the swivelling screen – that can fold round so it’s closed the other way – and the dual-touchpad interface. Obviously you sacrifice whatever typing feel you’d get from a normal keyboard, but E-Lead obviously expect UMPC buyers to be doing more surfing and general navigating than typing. It’s an interesting variation on the idea of using touch to navigate; contrast with, say, Gigabyte’s M912 mini-tablet PC, which uses an LCD touchscreen. Intuitive in a different way, perhaps, but using touchpads rather than a relatively expensive touchscreen keep prices down: NT$16,500 ($543) for the Noahpad EL-460 versus $600+ for the M912.
