Android Market maintenance scheduled for Thursday bringing web-based market, payment Options?

The Android Market will be receiving a maintenance update starting at 10pm Thursday night and will be finished at 4am and during that time, developers will not be able to update their applications during that time. Check out the email sent from the Android Market team to developers:

Hello,

We’re writing to inform you about a planned service outage impacting Android Market that requires your attention.

We plan to perform maintenance on the Android Market Developer Console on Thursday 18 November 2010 from 10PM to 4AM Pacific Standard Time. During this time, there will be view-only access to the Developer Console at http://market.android.com/publish. You will be able to view your list of applications and error reports; however, you will not be able to upload new apps or make updates to existing apps. The publish status of your applications and use of the Android Market app on phones should not be impacted.

Thanks, and we appreciate your patience while we work to improve Android Market.

Regards,
The Android Market Team

With Eric Schmidt’s statement at Web 2.0 on Monday, saying that Gingerbread would be coming out in the next couple of weeks, we’re sure that Google is making the necessary preparations and according the the screen grab below, it’s clear that the Android Market will be completely revamped.

Along with the visual changes, it looks like Google is also preparing for another payment option, could PayPal support be coming with this major Android Market overhaul? We’re exciting to see what changes will be coming to the market and we’ll see them in due time. The image below hints of additional payment functionality coming to the market and it looks as if we’ll get a web-based version of the Android Market as well. Are you excited?