Tech Olive

According to market research firm iSuppli, Seagate still holds the top spot in the hard drive market with 31% of the market share in Q4 2009. Overall, shipments were up 8% to 49.9 million units, bu Western Digital is right behind Seagate with 30% of the share.

You’d think that WD would be leaps and bounds ahead of Seagate with all of the complaints about Seagate, but it seems that the company will keep the top position through this quarter, according to iSuppli Analyst Fang Zhang.

via [WSJ]

The boys over at Game Informer again get some awesome exclusive info about Portal 2. This time, they talk to Portal 2‘s concept artist who reveals a bunch about the conceptual process of the game along with some samples of character concepts. The interview covers main character Chell’s redesign, co-op bot design and tons of other information about how the design team struggled to make Portal 2 feel new, but not change too much from the original recipe. It’s a fantastic article and is mostly spoiler-free, but it’s hard to say for sure since it’s all about concepts so any number of things could still change between now and the game’s release.

Head over to Game Informer and read the interview.

For anyone that has not yet purchased it, Steam has slashed the price of L4D2 by 50%. So now you can grab a single copy of the game for $24.99 or get the 4-pack for $74.99! Head over to Steam with a few friends and make the best of this awesome deal while it lasts!

Starting at $19, you can get yourself a pistol flash drive, but don’t expect to get away with it on the plane or anywhere else in public for that matter.

• 2GB – $19
• 4GB – $22
• 8GB – $33

To accompany the new Steam GUI and Mac support, Valve is working on many little functionality changes to Steam. For all the details, you can check out their PDF brochure, but the biggest changes include Valve increasing the Steam Cloud per-game storage limit from 1MB to 100MB and the addition of micro-transaction support. Overall, the brochure makes for an interesting read. 2010 is set to be a huge year of growth and evolution for Steam.

via [Big Download]

SanDisk has announced today that they’re shipping out their new 32GB microSDHC card, doubling the 16GB that they released in January of last year.

So for those yearning to have more storage space on your mobile device, you’ll be able to grab one of these in exchange for just $200. They should be hitting online retailers anytime now.

It’s still absolutely amazing to think that you can fit an incredible amount of data inside a small slab of plastic the size of a thumb nail.

[Press Release]

Whether you’ve beaten the game yourself or spent just about any time on the internet, you’ve heard Portal‘s face-meltingly awesome ending credits song “Still Alive” written by Jonathan Coulton. Well, during a phone interview with Ars Technica, Jonathan leaked a bit of information regarding his continued work with Valve on Portal 2:

“I will be doing music for Portal 2 as well, yeah. You know, I think Valve and I were both really happy with how ‘Still Alive’ turned out, and it was an overwhelmingly popular response to something we thought was maybe gonna be a bit weird and unusual,” Coulton explained. “We weren’t sure how it was gonna go. And so it’s gonna be hard to live up to that success, and it was sort of a surprise to everyone, us included, so … I don’t know, we’ll see. The sequel is always a troublesome thing, and sequels are rarely better than the original. Empire Strikes Back is the only exception that I can think of.”

So, if there was ever any doubt about Portal 2‘s upcoming greatness, this should remove any and all doubt. Is it October yet?

via [Ars Technica]

We here at the Olive admire carbon fiber, and Asus has hit our sweet spot by creating a carbon fiber masterpiece known as the 1001PX. It’ll sport the new Atom N450 and 1GB of DDR2 RAM. There will be two models, one that has Windows 7 and a 9-hour battery life with 250GB of storage that will cost $406, and the other sporting Windows XP with a 5-hour battery life and 160GB of storage that will cost $326. Both feature the usual three USB 2.0 ports, VGA, ethernet, WiFi b/g, SD card reader, and a 0.3MP webcam. The whole netbook is said to have a weight of just 2.2 pounds. From the photo itself, it looks like the outside is just a carbon fiber finish, while the rest of the body is the usual plastic. Nonetheless, any carbon fiber is a good thing in our book.

The 1001PX will first show up in Europe, but we should expect it to arrive in the States soon after.

[NotebookItalia via SlashGear]

The Bargain Bin is a weekly feature on Tech Olive that helps gamers in the tough economy. How does it help? Once a week, it offers a great and cheap game ($10 or less) to keep you going until your next paycheck.

This week in the bargain bin, we offer you a fairly new game. Shatter, released the 15th of this month, has managed to grab us much like Audiosurf did when it first released. We have a soft spot for indie games here at the Olive and Shatter knows exactly how to poke that spot with its stick.

Continue Reading »

Hey, folks! It’s Monday! And that means we’re having our weekly giveaway tonight.

After we realized that we have a ton of cool stuff just sitting around and collecting dust, we decided to get rid of it the easy way by giving it away to our loyal readers. This cool stuff ranges from stickers to gaming headsets to case fans to gaming mouse pads and more. Some items are brand new in the box, while others have been opened up for review purposes.

Here’s the deal, we’ll be giving away one item through Twitter every Monday at 6:00PM EST until we run out of stuff to giveaway. We’ll ask a trivia question related and the first person to reply to us with the correct answer will be the winner for that week. Sound simple? It is, so be sure to follow us on Twitter for your chance to win some cool stuff!

A few rules:

- You can only win once (to keep it fair).
- You must be a resident of the United States (sorry, foreigners).
- Winners will be notified via DM in Twitter. They must respond before the next week’s giveaway or else they will forfeit their win.

Image Credit: c.j.b