As reported a few weeks ago, the E-Lead Noahpad has an updated keyboard/touchpad that supports multi-touch. What I didn’t notice at the time was that the two parts of the keyboard have moved closer together. The Noahpad used to have a thick piece of plastic separating the right keypad from the left keypad. Now it looks like two pieces are smooshed together.

But it doesn’t look like that will make typing any easier, because the Noahpad’s still got just two big buttons. When you press a letter or number key, you’re actually just pressing a region of the left or right button, which I imagine is going to make touch typing extremely difficult.

E-Lead has added a bunch of gestured-based navigation features, which you can see in the video above. But that looks like a lot of motions to memorize just to make up for the fact that the Noahpad has a low resolution 800 x 480 pixel display. While companies like Asus, HP, Acer, Dell, and MSI decided to release computers with higher resolution screens, E-Lead’s Noahpad keeps the same low resolution as the original Eee PC, but lets you open windows that are too large for your screen and scroll left, right, up and down to view them. I think I’d go crazy if I had to use that feature for anything more than a few minutes of light web browsing a day.

[via Eee PC News.de and Eee-PC.de]