Tech Olive

With the launch of the Palm Pre right around the corner, rumors are starting to heat up about quantities on the new phone. Supposedly, Best Buy is set to only receive about 4,250 Pres on launch day to distribute to all of its nearly 1,000 stores. That means on average, each store will only be getting 4 Pres! With a rumored total of only 30,000 Pres being available across the US on launch day, you should probably consider camping out for a couple days if you want to grab one of these bad boys.

Hot on the heels of the new Sniper and Spy class update, Valve is having a free weekend for Team Fortress 2. Starting tomorrow (Friday, of course) you can download and play the game completely free. Go here to preload the game on your Steam account, so that way you can play the moment it opens up on Friday morning.

Cooler Master is obviously known for their radical cases and cooling products. Personally, Cooler Master is my choice for my PC case fans, but what about laptop cooling pads? Sure, there’s a good market for them, with many choices, but there’s got to be some that stand out from the rest with features or even just reliability and acoustics. Is the Cooler Master Notepal X1 capable of dominating the rest of the market’s offerings? Well, without testing every single notebook cooler ever made, I’m afraid I can’t answer that, but this review is a good start.

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We mean that literally. Ken Brinkman woke up at 1:30 in the morning to the smell of, not fresh bacon, but burning plastic as his MacBook Pro caught fire.

“Smoke was pouring out the seam between the unibody and bottom enclosure. I actually burned my hand pretty badly ripping the adapter out. Oh man. This is reallllly scary because what if I didn’t wake up? It could of burned my house down.” –Ken Brinkman

We’ve seen this before with iPods catching fire, but this is just crazy. Another photo after the break.

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For this review, we at the Olive decided to do it a little differently. In this two-part review, you will read the opinions of Craig and Tim.  A Left-handed and a Right-handed review, respectively. You will also notice that we changed the standard method of scoring for this review but rest assured, this is merely a temporary change for the sake of this article.

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We would like to make a quick and painless announcement. You might have been wondering why there is a hyphon in our current domain name. This is because techolive.com was already registered at the time. We’ve been in contact with the owner of that domain name and he has graciously donated techolive.com to us!

www.techolive.com should be working fine as of now. All of our emails have also changed to sport the new domain. Stroll over to the Contact Us page to see the new email address changes.

For now, the home page is the only page that will use the techolive.com domain. All other links will still bearer the hyphonated version.

So, tell us what you think.

We received an email today from ACE Team regarding the future of the company. According to the email, ACE is planning to make Zeno Clash 2! Read the email below.

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Bethesda has announced that not only are there two more DLC expansions planned for Fallout 3, but also that they are all headed to PS3. The upcoming DLC is planned for a release late this July, Point Lookout and Mothership Zeta will release for Xbox 360 and PC at the usual cost of 800 MS points or $10, and will release on PC and Xbox 360 first.

Operation: Anchorage will be released for PS3 in late June, followed by the release of The Pitt and Broken Steel 4-6 weeks apart. Release dates will be forthcoming. — Quote from Bethesda

This is the first bit of news about the Palm Pre that you’ve heard from us. Why? Because all the rumors about the new smartphone have been beaten to death. We didn’t want you guys to have to deal with the agony. But, at last, it’s now official!

Sprint announced that the Palm Pre will be available starting June 6 with a price tag of $200 after a $100 mail-rebate and a 2-year contract. The phone will go on sale nationwide (US only for the moment) at Sprint stores, Best Buy, Radio Shack, and select Wal-Mart stores. The Pre will be available under Sprint’s Everything Data or Business Essentials with Messaging and Data plans.

The technical preview for Microsoft Office 2010 is coming this July and leaked screenshots have already been collected for build 14.0.4006.1010 (this build has also hit torrents). Check out some of the screenies below and click the link at the end for the complete set.

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