Keyboard

One of the most unexpected strengths of the E1-470P is its keyboard, which—rare as it is within the budget notebook market—is surprisingly solid and comfortable to use. Granted, it can’t quite compare to the luxury of a top-end Lenovo ThinkPad, HP Spectre, or Dell Latitude keyboard, but the sheer fact that it’s even mentionable in the same breath is rather shocking. It’s a Chiclet-style model, featuring comfortable key spacing and logical organization and styling. All of the keys are easy to operate, including the half-height arrow keys, which only take a bit of getting used to. The keys aren’t afflicted by the same sort of rattling effect one finds with most inexpensive notebook keyboards.

The stroke is also comfortable, with fairly low actuation force and a mostly quiet but still quite palpable stop. Travel is more than sufficient as well, making each keystroke easy to identify and providing great overall feedback. The matte key surfaces are smooth but slightly textured, and unlike the plastic filling the spaces between them, they don’t retain fingerprints. While it’s a notch below the best keyboards we’ve tested, this is a great keyboard overall; about the only thing completely missing is backlighting, which is hardly a surprise given the price point.

Touchpad

The touchpad, on the other hand, is absolutely nothing special. It’s manufactured by Alps Electric, and using the supplied driver version 8.100.2020.116, we found gestures to be occasionally finicky, but overall operation to be fairly smooth (yet unremarkable). Accuracy wasn’t much of an issue, and though not everyone will love it, the textured surface is at least superior to smooth-finished models that are hampered by humid conditions (thus making finger gliding a challenge). More objectively frustrating is the ever-irritating clickbar at the bottom of the pad (a single piece of plastic whose far left and right sides represent the two mouse buttons); pressing anywhere but on the far edges of this bar will not register a click without significant pressure, meaning that right-clicking while using your thumb requires a bit of practice and more acrobatic dexterity than is ideal.

Touchscreen

The E1-480P’s third and final input method—again, impressive for its class—is the touchscreen, which supports 10-point multitouch and registers gestures as well as the best models. We experienced no problems with multitouch input and gestures such as pinch-to-zoom and drag scrolling, and we found navigating the system using the touchscreen as comfortable as on much more expensive Ultrabooks.