The number of netbooks and ultra-portable computing systems available on the market has steadily increased over the past year or so, reaching nowadays what can only be described as a boiling point. So, it's no wonder that there's a large number of products competing nowadays for exactly the same spot on the market, and one of them is the Noahpad from E-Lead, which brings some interesting novelties to the table, while also retaining a few “classic” UMPC features.



The manufacturers have chosen just VIA hardware for the Noahpad. Thus, the netbook is built around a

VIA Eden C7 -1.0G / CX700 all-in-one CPU and Chipset combo, accompanied by 512 MB of DDR2 memory and a 1.8-inch, 30 GB HDD unit. These components make the portable computing system powerful enough to run either the Ubuntu 7.10 or the Windows XP operating systems, as well as several of their associated applications.



Additionally, the Noahpad has been equipped with a 7-inch LCD panel (1024x768 pixels resolution) with LED backlight, a built-in microphone, an earphone jack and built-in speakers. All of the components listed above are powered by the 4-cell 3900 mAh Li-Ion battery, but the manufacturers fail to say anything about the product's battery estimated functioning life.



From the point of view of its connectivity options, the Noahpad is rather boring, since it sports an Ethernet connector, Wireless LAN (b/g) connector and a Bluetooth connector. Moreover, the netbook even provides support for an external 3G / 3.5 G antenna, but not the antenna itself, and also packs a built-in card reader with support for SD cards.



The Noahpad from E-Lead sells for an estimate 500 US dollars, which is a bit expensive, considering the device's computing power and the fact that there are a lot of more advanced machines retailing for a lot less out there.