Summary: News: It’s official: Google Fiber is coming to Austin “by mid-2014” Product, pricing will be “roughly similar to Kansas City," Google says Just days after Google sent out a sneaky little announcement inviting the press to the Texas capital, the company has now confirmed what we’d all long suspected. Austin is slated to receive the gigabit speed of Google Fiber “by mid-2014,” with a “similar choice of products as our customers in Kansas City,” priced at “roughly similar to Kansas City.” Google has been reticent to say what its broader plans are for bringing Google Fiber to other communities around the US—on Monday, two Wall Street analysts concluded that Google likelywouldn’t bring it to the rest of the country. Currently, in the Kansas City area, the service comes in three options: a $120 per month package (which includes TV-over-IP and a DVR to go along with it), a $70 per month package (same gigabit speed, minus the TV), and an option to get your house “Google Fiber”-ready at a one-time construction cost of $300 (which can be split up over 12 months)—that will bring 5Mbps, for free, over seven years. “We’re also planning to connect many public institutions as we build in Austin—schools, hospitals, community centers, etc.—at a gigabit for no charge,” the company added in a corporate blog post on Monday. Google will be hosting a conference call for reporters on Monday afternoon, and we will update this story once we’ve heard more from the call. http://arstechnica.com/business/2013/04/its-official-google-fiber-is-coming-to-austin-by-mid-2014/ Google begins rolling out Google Play revamp for Android It was only yesterday that we reported on the leaks, but it looks like Google has made it official. In a blog post on the official Android blog, Michael Siliski, group product manager for Google Play, announced the rollout of the redesigned Android marketplace for Android phones and tablets running Android 2.2 Froyo or higher. Siliski says that the redesign is focused on being “simple [and] clean” and that it's meant to help users find content faster. We've done a side-by-side comparison to show the old Google Play store—a jumbled mix of images and text—next to the revamped version. The latter shows a nicely compartmentalized interface with a dedicated row of buttons at the top for the types of media that can be downloaded from the service. The new design has bigger images that “jump off the page.” Content that belongs together is grouped together, and purchasing has been simplified so that it’s faster to check out of the Play store. Even individual categories have been given a makeover. If you haven’t received an update to Google Play just yet (we haven't), sit tight. Google says it will roll out over the next few weeks. http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/04/google-begins-rolling-out-google-play-revamp-for-android/ 60,000 Apps pulled from Google Play - http://techcrunch.com/2013/04/08/nearly-60k-low-quality-apps-booted-from-google-play-store-in-february-points-to-increased-spam-fighting/ Waiting for a 1TB SSD below $1 per GB? Crucial says wait no more Crucial announced in a press release this morning that it has begun selling its latest round of consumer-grade solid-state disks (SSDs), the M500. The 2.5-inch SATA III SSDs are the follow-up to Crucial's M4 SSDs, which are a pretty popular choice for people adding SSDs to existing systems (I think I have four or five M4s scattered in computers around my house). The drives use 20nm MLC NAND sourced from Micron (and if you're not sure what MLC NAND is, we've got a great SSD primer right here), along with a Micron-provided SSD controller. Performance for the M500 drives is what you'd expect from a drive in this class: sequential read and write speeds of 500MB per second and 400MB per second. But the big news about the announcement is the capacities. The M500 is available in standard pedestrian capacities of 120GB and 240GB,
