Tech Olive

According to a recent interview with Sony’s Masayuki Chatani, the company considered putting solid state drives in their PS3 Slim units and even flirted with network storage to further reduce the overall size of the console. Obviously these options were rejected due to cost reasons. Sony also considered external power supplies, but Chatani says that there would’ve been “imposed restrictions on transport and use, making it harder to use freely.”

via [Kotaku]

Funcom has announced their plans to make Age of Conan a free-to-play MMO for the first 20 levels of the game. There’s only one catch: you must sign up for the free trial of the game before January 1, 2010. It’s not exactly a large window of time, but it’s an amazing offer nonetheless.

“Anyone who downloads, registers, and starts playing the trial before January 1st 2010 will be able to enjoy all of level one to twenty – the entire Island of Tortage experience – without ever having to upgrade to a full account or pay a subscription fee. This unique Unlimited Free Trial campaign is only available until January 1st as a special holiday offer to anyone who wishes to experience the sexy and savage world of Conan.” — Funcom

I’m not an MMO kinda guy, but I’ll be downloading the trial and giving this game a try for myself. Anyone else gonna give it a whirl?

via [GameStooge]

That’s right, L4D2‘s first DLC plans have been announced and they promise to be fulfilling. Scheduled for release “early Spring 2010″ for PC and Xbox 360, the DLC will bring everyone’s favorite survivors from L4D1 as well as new standard infected, new weapons and “The Passing”, a new campaign that takes place just after the “Dead Center” L4D2 campaign. The new campaign will come with multiplayer and new co-op gameplay, as well as new, unannounced game modes. It’s safe to assume that this piece of DLC will come free to PC gamers, but pricing has not yet been announced. Follow the break for a quote from Valve.

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Standing at only 7mm in height, Seagate’s Momentus Thin drive will be the thinnest 2.5-inch hard drive on the market come January when they’ll reveal it at CES. No word on exact price or availability yet, but it’s said that they’ll be shipped to OEMs first thing next year with 160GB and 250GB flavors. The Momentus Thin will also sport an 8MB cache, 5400RPM spindle speed and the SATA 3Gb/s interface. Continue on after the break for the full press release.

UPDATE: We’ve been in contact with Seagate about price and availability for consumers. As of now all we have is that the MSRP for the 250GB model will be $55. Stay tuned for more updates.

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The most recent rumor flying around in these here parts is a big one. Apparently this is Google’s new phone, the Nexus One (which is what it’s being referred as, but that’s not the official name we don’t think). Designed by Google and manufactured by HTC, it sports a 3.7-inch AMOLED display, a Snapdragon processor running on Android 2.1 and features a 5.0 MP camera along with two microphones to assist in noise cancellation. The phone will be sold by Google as an unlocked, carrier independent device and it’s said that phone will work with T-Mobile and AT&T (Verizon shot it down). Rumor originally got around when the phones were handed out to Google employees, which were then tweeted about.

It’s said that the Nexus One will be releasing in January 2010 and leaked photos have already shown up in multiple places (including the one above), but Google has yet to make an official announcement even though they posted about something on their blog.

This is quite a big leap for Google. If they’re going to enter the smartphone war this late in the game, they better be pulling off something extraordinary if they want to compete with the iPhone, BlackBerry and the other Android devices. Many are saying it could be the next iPhone killer, but we aren’t going that far out of our way to call it that just yet.

UPDATE: Engadget now has exclusive photos of the Nexus One. They’re much clearer and say a lot more about the device. The main thing is seeing that it’s running Android 2.1 like we mentioned earlier, but it looks very similar to 2.0.

UPDATE: Boy Genius Report has a couple of high res photos!

via [Engadget]

Image Credit: Cory O’Brien

The Weekly Olive is a new feature published every Sunday night that recaps the weeks important news and reviews.

Sorry folks about not having the Weekly Olive posted up the last couple of Sundays, but we’re finally back with it! This past week was sure a busy one. We had several reviews, a feature roundup and we also liveblogged the 2009 Video Game Awards. Check out all the cool stuff we posted these past few days after the break.

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We heard about Seagate’s new hard drive that uses the 6Gbps interface, but this is the first time we’re hearing about a 6Gbps solid state drive. The fellows over at PC Perspective got a hold of a Marvell prototype 6Gbps SSD and decided to test it out a bit. Since the prototype was read-only, they could only benchmark read speeds, which turned out to be 33 percent faster than one of the fastest SSDs on the market today, the Intel X25-M G2. One of the biggest statistics that left us with dropped jaws was the 175 percent increase in performance over the 6Gbps Seagate drive. Wow!

It turns out that Marvell won’t actually be manufacturing these 6Gbps SSDs, but hopefully we’ll see other companies in the future take charge of this.

via [PC Perspective]

The boys over at Lifehacker have rounded up the best tips, tricks, hints and hacks of photography for this past year. Everything from simple tips to better lighting all the way to DIY tilt-shift and macro lenses, but our favorite one has to be the DIY flash diffuser made from an empty cigarette packet. Hit up the link below to see all the cool hacks.

[Lifehacker]

Image Credit: mariczka

After a night packed with excitement and first-looks at upcoming games, Spike announced the year’s best games, in their respective categories and, of course, the almighty Game of the Year. But that’s not all the night brought. We also saw a sneak peek at many new games. Follow the break for details and trailers.

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Earlier today we posted about how a Verizon rep told an existing customer that if he were to upgrade his DSL plan, it would “burn his house down.” We just received word from a Verizon spokesman by the name of Bill Kula who commented on the situation. See what he had to say after the break.

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