We’re 17 days away from the new year, and far before Auld Lang Syne begins playing and we pretend to know the words (after all the champagne, who can remember the lyrics we optimistically Google’d the day before anyways?), we’re pondering what changes are in store for us the next twelve months.

In a whitepaper released by ABI Research this week, their tech analysts took a collective look into the crystal ball for 2012 and (in their words) “have drawn some bold lines in the sand on a plethora of top-of-mind topics.”

But instead of predicting what WOULD happen in the mobile and telecom space, they took a different spin on the usual list and forecasted what WOULDN’T happen.  Nice twist.  (And a really good read.)

One of their more interesting predictions for those of us in software testing is by Patrick Connolly, Senior Analyst of Telematics and Navigation:  “Indoor location will NOT become commonplace in 2012.” 

It’s easy to see how this could be true…but also surprising.

After all, for as many articles that have been written about the technological challenges in making Indoor Location Based Services (LBS) a reality, there has been an equal amount of big name, big buzz announcements about it over the past few months.  There are dozens of industry-leading companies—including Apple, Navteq, Qualcomm and Nokia—tackling the challenge from every angle.

There are even some major apps launching to give Indoor LBS a jolt from vision to reality.  For instance, Google announced on their Mobile blog in November that the new Google Maps 6.0 gives users (on Android OS 2.1 mobile devices) the ability to Map the Vast Indoors, vis-à-vis:

“When you’re inside an airport, shopping mall, retail store, or other public space, Google Maps 6.0 for Android brings the freestanding map directory to the palm of your hands –helping you determine where you are, what floor you’re on, and where to go indoors. For example, in this busy travel season, you can use Google Maps 6.0 to help you find your way around airports.”

So what does Connolly think we can expect in 2012?  He proposes that there will be “isolated mobile applications and services around individual high-traffic public areas like airports and malls.”

For software testers, the proliferation of LBS (indoor and out) means it’s becoming ever critical to move a portion of the testing out of the lab and into the wild so apps can be tested in real world conditions.  After all, if LBS is inaccurate inside a mall by 100 feet—and the store we’re trying to find (hello, Cinnabon!) isn’t anywhere near where we thought it was– it might as well be off by a mile.  The ball is increasingly in our court to make sure this cool, new tech is a consumer delight… not a dud.

As an industry, we’re on the cusp of some exciting indoor location, tracking, mapping, and navigation apps that will enrich the user experience.  And we’re playing a critical role in making it possible.

We’ll toast to that.

1. Company X dreams up a new app (or a new version)
2. Product management specs the requirements; engineering builds it, and QA tests it
3. As soon as it launches,  Twitter and Facebook blow up with user complaints about how the app doesn’t work; is confusing to use; is slow; or some other flaw
4. Everyone blames engineering and QA for launching something that sucks

So what went wrong?  We need better test automation… we need to outsource testing… we need to partner our testers with our engineers… we need better product documentation… we need to move from SCRUM to Kanban.  We invest thousand of hours and millions of dollars trying to create apps that work as designed — not just inside our firewall, but in the hands of users.

Problem is, we focus all of these good intentions on stuff that occurs inside the lab (whether it’s our in-house QA lab, our test automation, or a vendor’s test lab 12 timezones away).  And users don’t consume our app under the sterile conditions of a lab environment. So how do companies ensure that their apps work as well under real-world conditions as they do under lab conditions? There are two ways:

1. Running a beta program
2. Push a portion of their testing out into a distributed community

And as MG points out over at TechCrunch in a recent post about Apple’s launch of Siri, the use of the “beta” label no longer lets companies off the hook with regards to app quality:

God forbid that a service explicitly labeled as “beta” behave like a service still in beta. I understand that this is a bit of a tough concept to understand since companies like Google leave software in beta for the better part of a decade, thus castrating the term. But look no further than how rarely Apple actually labels something as “beta”. They basically never do it. They only do it when they expect a service to be less than spectacular 100 percent of the time.

That’s why we recently launched InTheWildTesting.com — not as some commercial movement, but as an educational vehicle for dev and QA management.

The fundamental premise is this:  if your users are going to be spread around the country or world, using different hardware & software configurations, and using your app under less-than-ideal conditions, so should (a portion of) your testing.  Said differently, your testing should mimic your user base.  The feedback has been amazingly positive, and resulted in a lot of “of course!” head slapping from top-notch tech execs.

In truth, tech execs spend a lot of time and money thinking about how to improve app quality. And it’s time for them to move beyond thinking of testing solely in terms of automated vs. manual, or in-house vs. outsourced.  It’s time to also consider how much testing should be done in the lab vs. in the wild.  So let me ask you:  what are some apps or industries that should be testing more under real-world, in-the-wild conditions?  Drop us a note in the comments.

The most recent complaint is the battery drain, but there are others, as documented in this YouTube video and listed below.

• iPhone 4S Battery bug
• Audio Bug

Add your iOS 5 bug list in the comments below.

P.S. – Apple, did you know we’re giving away free test cycles?

Previously, the issue was whether I should I invest in iOS and start the conversion over from a lifetime on Windows.  After all, my dad was a 30-year IBM vet, which put food on the table and paid my tuition.  I grew up seeing mammoth mainframes, punchcards…glowing green DOS.  No Apples of any color in our Big Blue household.

But on this occasion, it wasn’t a question of brand loyalty. It was the obvious: the loss of Steve Jobs.

I still find myself processing his passing both emotionally and practically. I remember how the AP alert popped up on my phone and it literally felt like someone had punched me in the stomach.  I admired him for living authentically, taking billion dollar gambles on ideas, picking himself up after billion dollar failures, and holding steadfast (stubborn?) to his vision.

I’m convinced his near-religious zeal over every minutiae of product design stemmed from the same social ethic that led to Apple’s creation:  to make computers so easy and user-friendly that everyone could benefit from computing’s powerful potential.  Not just the technical, highly-educated and elite. Computers for Everyman.

Attention to detail.  Risk-taking. Singular focus. These are among the core values of the Apple brand. As I considered buying the iPad, I wondered:  Are these values sufficiently infused in Tim Cook and the company DNA to continue on without Steve?  Or will Apple employees slowly lose direction like followers of the North Star left without guide over too many cloudy nights?

The only constant in life is change, it’s said.  And over the next 3-5 years, it’s going to be interesting to watch every stakeholder in the Apple ecosystem silently cast their vote about the saliency of the brand, and collectively determine the company’s future.

Consumers will judge with their pocketbooks whether iDevices remain revolutionary.  Enterprises will decide to invest in the iPad…or not.  Talent will vote with their pen, signing job offers from Apple…or not.  App developers will watch marketshare and and competing platforms’ ability to drive revenue with app discovery and merchandising technologies. Suppliers will re-evaluate their strategic alliances and preferred partners.

And investors? Competitors like Google?  Watching all of these subtle harbingers like hawks.

Acutely aware of his fragile mortality, Steve Jobs must surely have accelerated his succession planning and spent hours meditating on how best to expand a corporate culture of entrepreneurialism.  I can only begin to imagine the burden of responsibility he (like all CEOs) must have felt to maintain job security for the nearly 50,000 Apple employees worldwide.  And not the least, the utter determination he must have felt privately to ensure that his vision…his passion… continued beyond his lifetime.  This was a man who worked on Apple until his last day.

In a 2008 interview with CNN Money, Jobs confirmed:  “I mean, some people say, ‘Oh, God, if [Jobs] got run over by a bus, Apple would be in trouble.’ And, you know, I think it wouldn’t be a party, but there are really capable people at Apple. My job is to make the whole executive team good enough to be successors, so that’s what I try to do.”

Time will tell.

What do you predict for Apple in a post-Steve Jobs world?

“The only way to do great work, is to love the work that you do.”

Thoughts from the crew here at uTest (if you have a quote, story or link about Jobs that you’d like to share, please drop us a comment below):

@jennymoebius –”Today just isn’t the same. Although I personally didn’t know Steve Jobs, I strongly felt the blow of not having him around anymore – to invent, to create, to amaze and to connect us all in ways no one had ever dreamed before. Steve turned every one of us from passive users of technology into true creators – and those that give us the tools to further ourselves and the human race are remembered for all time.” #thankyouSteve

@spchampion — “My first experience using a Mac was when I was in college. I had a job with the university doing technical support, and they assigned me a brand new Blueberry iBook as my work computer. It was such a simple and elegant little laptop, and I was amazed at its build quality and design. But something was missing – the iBook had a handle on the back for carrying it places, but I was still tied to the wall by an Ethernet cable.

Apple had thought of this, and inside that little iBook they had included an incredibly cutting-edge piece of hardware that would let you use Ethernet wirelessly. This was new and risky – no other computer manufacturer was doing anything similar. In fact, this technology was so innovative that only one company made the base-station needed to create a wireless network: Apple.

When Apple launched the first generation Airport (itself a very elegant piece of hardware), I bought one immediately and set it up inside my dorm room. Then I detached my iBook from the wall, took it outside, and sat down on the grass in a nearby courtyard. I checked my email. I surfed the web. I saw the future.

Eleven years later, I came home from work one night, picked up my iPad, and sat down on my couch. I asked the iPad to load CNN, and the wireless network in my house (a second-generation Airport) happily dispatched the request and delivered the result. The news stunned me: Steve Jobs, the man responsible for all this innovation at my fingertips, had passed away.

Before Steve Jobs’ return, Apple was a company that made respectable but odd hardware. They used a proprietary keyboard connector called Apple Desktop Bus. They used SCSI for their hard drives. Their networking was done with AppleTalk. None of these technologies were particularly bad, but none of them changed the world either. What Steve Jobs did for Apple was to force the company to push the boundaries of technology and hardware in a way that would change the world for their customers. The original iBook was a brilliant example of this vision. It combined innovative hardware (an 802.11b radio) with a wildly iconic design, included high quality components, used emerging standards for connectivity (USB), and sold at a price that every college student could love. It was a computer you could use anywhere and connect to anything. It changed my world.

Thank you, Steve. I hope that we can keep pushing ourselves and our civilization as well as you did. ”

@edlavalette – “Steve Jobs had a unique ability to envision solutions to problems before us mortal users knew we had these problems.”

@matjohnston –  “They could (and will) write libraries on Steve Jobs’ career — the break-through products he envisioned; the entirely new categories he created; saving Apple from the brink; saving the music industry; reinventing a big piece of the movie-making business. But what stands out to me is Jobs’ utter disrespect and disdain for the status quo. This man simply could not play by the rules that govern most execs and brands in modern times:

• Manage expectations… tamp down what customers, competitors and media expect from you. Jobs and Apple continually raised expectations to frothy heights — and then met or even beat them.
• Stick to what you’re good at… brands and execs are taught to focus on their core competencies and not to stray from it.  Jobs and Apple were never constrained by the preconceived notions of “experts” about industry lines, price point or market segment. And we have the iPod, iPhone, iTunes and iPad because of it.
• Give the market what they want… we look endlessly at market research, customer satisfaction surveys, web analytics hoping to uncover what the market wants. But Jobs connected with the market on a deeper level and knew where tastes were heading before anyone else — competitors, media, or even consumers themselves.
• Play nice… in this hyper-connected world, brands and leaders are afraid to make a mistake or ruffle someone’s feathers, lest a customer, employee, or blogger take to Twitter and lob a critique at them. Jobs made an art form of autocratic-yet-engaging leadership. He proved that you don’t have to stoop to benign platitudes and empty talk to reach an audience — that people can and will rise to a challenge.
• Be bold… Many execs and brands play it safe these days (too often, this includes uTest). But Jobs put it all out there — in his vision for technology & design; in his management style; and in the tenor of his yearly Stevenote addresses at Mac World.

Thanks Steve. Thanks for showing us that we don’t have to choose between form and function. For inspiring a new generation of tech leaders who have a similar single-mindedness and audacity of vision.  Here’s hoping we all remember to #ThinkDifferent

@Mahhcc – “My first experience with an Apple product was in the 1st grade, and since then I’ve owned 2 iPhones and numerous Mac computers, all of which I’ve loved. Although I didn’t know him personally, I will always admire Steve for creating products that people love and for turning Apple into the company that everyone races to catch up to.”

@jamesc_utest– “It’s an unfortunate thing to lose a mind like Steve Jobs, especially to such a heartbreaking thing like cancer. Someone with so much more he could’ve accomplished in technology with more time. We could’ve been sitting here 10 years from now, talking about how Steve jobs innovated the first Apple Car (iCar), for all we know. I was always a fan of Apple products, but never really understood my fanboy obsession until after college when in my first job I was given a macbook for every day use.

The ease of being able to pick up a product and just use it is something that wasn’t just Steve’s mantra, it was true in every sense. With Steve gone, I think one of the most lasting quotes I want to remember is when he said “Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared water or do you want a chance to change the world?”

@roysolomon — “For me Steve Jobs represents what entrepreneurship is all about, a lot of ups and downs, but if you stick to your truth and you are really gifted then you can change the world. In many ways we are like those in the 1400s who had the privilege of living in the age of Leonardo Da Vinci.”

My favorite quote from this speech: “The only way to do great work, is to love the work that you do.”

Happy testing!

iOS developers love iOS (of course), and as recently as 2008, 50% of them were also OS X developers. But today, that percentage has dropped to 7%, and most iOS developers are now actively developing for other platforms instead (including the iPad). This makes a lot of sense – the skillset for developing a mobile application has become more and more specialized, and the developers who can do that well may not have the skills or interest in developing for a desktop platform.

But the data holds other clues as well. For example, almost half of iOS developers also develop for Android. And even though all the developers think iOS is the best platform for monetization (they were attending WWDC after all), 40% of them thought Android was the platform with the greatest potential for future growth. By the way, that question included iOS as an option as well, meaning that 40% of iOS developers attending WWDC actually thought Android was going to grow faster than iOS.

What other platforms did these developers think would have any chance of growing in the coming years? The only other one that made the list was Windows Phone 7 with 9% of respondents. That’s small, but interesting. Microsoft could have something good on their hands.

More details from Fortune and Macrumors.

Apple iPhone Tracking – First up, we learned last week that iPhones store their location in a file that never gets deleted, and then backup that file to iTunes each time the phone syncs. That means that anyone with access to a laptop belonging to an iPhone owner could see where they had been as long as they had owned their phone. (For the record, my iPhone says I spend a lot of time in Southborough, MA at the uTest headquarters.)

After a few days of silence on the issue, Apple announced that this was the result of a bug in iOS – three bugs actually. 1 – the iPhone keeps the location data for too long and should instead periodically purge it. 2 – this data is backed up to iTunes and should not be. 3 – the data is not deleted if a user disables location services. Apple has plans to fix all three bugs and to also begin encrypting the location file on the iPhone.

Why were they tracking this data at all? Apple uses this information (anonymously) to improve their location services and make it easier for iPhones to determine their location without having to resort to GPS (which is slow). But they only need a small amount of data at a time rather than the entire location history the iPhone was storing.

Do you have an iPhone? Are you curious to see where you’ve been? Here’s a clever app that will plot your location history on a map. If you’re into fancy statistical analysis, you can also use this add-on to plot your location using R.

Amazon EBS Outage – I don’t think anyone will deny that last weekend’s Amazon outage sucked for everyone involved. On April 21, cloud services in Amazon’s East Coast data center were dramatically impaired, halting operations for dozens of internet companies who use Amazon for hosting. The outage was long, and Amazon took several days to bring their data center back online.

Today, Amazon released a fascinating and detailed post-mortem explaining what happened during the outage and why. This document should be required reading for any software tester interested in root cause analysis. Amazon not only identifies what specifically triggered the event (an accidental network misconfiguration) but also how that single event could cause such a massive loss of service. It turns out that many of their well planned redundancies could, in the right circumstances, all execute at once and bring an entire data center to a grinding halt. They concluded that the real issue was software that incorrectly handled data replication during a failure – something they will correct with a bug-fix and update.

Kudos to Amazon for their transparency and for such a well documented failure analysis. We can all learn something from this.

$23 Million Books – Another Amazon story, but one for which they’re entirely blameless. Recently you could buy a copy of The Making of a Fly (a biology text) for a whopping $23,698,655.93 from their used book section. These books were not for sale by Amazon but rather by affiliates who use Amazon as an e-commerce platform. It turns out that two of those affiliates were locked in a very silly battle involving buggy pricing software that just didn’t know when to quit.

Bordeebook and Profnath are two independent book sellers who appear to use computer based pricing for their books. Bordeebook always set their price at 1.270589 times that of Profnath, and then Profnath would raise its price to be 0.9983 of Bordeebook. This cycle would continue over and over again until the top price of the book reached a whopping $23 million. The trend was originally noticed by Michael Eisen – a biology researcher at UC Berkeley. Eventually the issue was caught, and Profnath lowered their price to a more reasonable $106.23.

Lesson learned: when dealing with random data you should set checks, caps, and limits to prevent chaos.

Bugs Thwart Pirates – Not every bug is unplanned or undesirable. Would you believe that some game designers are even including bugs as a mechanism to identify and thwart software pirates? A recent article describes how one developer intentionally included a bug that would cause pirated versions of his game to crash with a very specific error message. When any pirates eventually posted a request for help on a software forum (along with the error message), moderators immediately knew they were dealing with a pirate and would instead ban them from the forum entirely.

This isn’t the first time game developers have used this trick. The always irreverent Cracked recently described six more examples in a recent posting. They range from the subtle (Batman is a klutz in pirated versions of Arkham Asylum) to the overt (the game music in Michael Jackson: The Experience is replaced with vuvuzelas).

Lesson learned: pay for your video games.

What an honor it is to have Jakob Nielsen – the “King of Usability” – as our Testing the Limits guest this month.

In part I of our interview, we get his thoughts on the evolution of user experience; the superiority of native apps; tablet usability; the death of PDF files; iPhone vs. Android and other hot topics. Be sure to check back tomorrow for Part II of the interview. Enjoy!

uTest: Like everything, software usability is in a constant state of change. How have you managed to stay on top of a field that seems to get turned upside down every other month?

JN: The users keep me fresh. I don’t really have to know anything, because I can simply see what our test participants use and how they use it.

uTest: It seems to us that software usability is as much a study of human behavior than anything else. What other subjects would you advise people to study who want to learn more about user preferences? Psychology? Sociology? Others?

JN: The main thing I recommend is to study your actual users: invite a handful of representative customers to your location and run them through simple usability studies of your software. One day in the lab is worth a year in university lecture halls, in terms of actionable lessons learned. (And remember that your “usability lab” can be a regular office or conference room —as long as you shut the door.)

That said, it’s still well worth studying all branches of psychology (perceptual, cognitive, social, etc.). One of the most popular courses at the Usability Week conference is called “The Human Mind and Usability” and summarizes the most salient psych findings for designers who don’t have time to go back to school.

It’s also worth studying visual design, even if you’re never going to draw anything yourself. Knowing the concepts and language is helpful when communicating with graphic designers, both to let them know what you want and to understand their ideas.

uTest: In the world of mobile, there’s been a lot written on the subject of native apps vs. the mobile web. What’s your take on this debate? Do both methods have a role to play in the user landscape? And for companies just venturing the mobile realm, where would you tell them to focus their attention?

JN: Apps are superior for 3 reasons:

• Empirically, users perform better with apps than with mobile sites in user testing.
• Apps are much better at supporting disconnected use and poor connectivity, both of which will continue to be important use cases for years to come. When I’m in London and don’t feel like being robbed by “roaming” fees, any native mapping app will beat Google Maps at getting me to the British Museum.
• Apps can be optimized for the specific hardware on each device. This will become more important in the future, as we get a broader range of devices.

Apps have the obvious downside of requiring more development resources, especially to be truly optimized for each device. If a company doesn’t have enough resources to do this right, it’s better to have a nice mobile site than a lame app.

A second downside of apps is that users have to install them. Our testing shows poor findability and usability in Apple’s Application Store, and many users won’t even bother downloading something at all for intermittent use. So ask yourself whether you’re really offering something within the hardcore mobile center of need: time-sensitive and/or location dependent, and whether your offer is truly compelling in this crowded space. Most companies are never going to make it big in mobile. In some cases all they need is to make their main website somewhat mobile-friendly. Many others should deliver a dedicated mobile site but not bother with apps.

uTest: Regarding tablets, we see a lot of companies taking their current iPhone app, increasing the graphic fidelity, and releasing it as an “original” iPad app. In your view, what the biggest mistake being made by companies developing apps specifically for tablet devices?

JN: The biggest problem in our recent tablet studies has been TMN: too much navigation. Also, too many inconsistently scrolling fields. Some tablet apps cram in so many weird features that users get overwhelmed and flail around without gaining mastery of the content.

I think that most designers of phone-based apps have recognized the need to limit the number of features and the number of wildly scrolling areas. The small screen imposes useful discipline that keeps out the worst excesses that still dilute usability on larger tablets.

While tablet UIs need to quiet down and become more consistent, that doesn’t mean that they should be phone designs with prettier graphics. The bigger screen allows for more features, and more focus on immersive use over longer periods of time than the quick hits that are most useful on phone-sized devices.

uTest: If you could eradicate one thing from the mainstream web to improve users’ experiences (eg: Flash, IE6, pop-ups, et al), what would it be and why?
JN: In 2000, it would definitely have been Flash. Today, it’s PDF.

uTest: Graduation season is coming up, which means a fresh batch of newly graduated graphic designers will be entering the workforce – if you could give them only one professional tip, what would it be?

JN: I know it’s boring, but the #1 tip for anybody involved with user interfaces is to do user testing: it’s invaluable to see how your design ideas work with real users. It’ll make your designs better, but it’ll also make you a better designer, because you’ll learn what’s real, as opposed to what sounded good in school.

uTest: With all of the focus now on mobile usability, have you seen any drop-off in the overall usability of traditional web and desktop apps? Is there a danger of these domains stagnating in the years ahead as mobile gets all the attention?

JN: No problem so far. While there’s always a danger, I think most companies realize that they cannot ignore their main website just because they get a mobile site or app. I usually emphasize that the usability guidelines for mobile are very different than the desktop guidelines, using this as an argument to design a separate mobile UI. But of course the argument cuts both ways: to be successful, you also need a separate desktop design. The desktop is where the vast majority of the money is made, except maybe for newspapers. Even when people use their mobile device for shopping, it’s often just for price comparisons and the actual purchase is made on a full-sized e-commerce site.

uTest: In terms of overall usability, what is your take on iPhone vs. Android? Is this a debate that will continue indefinitely? Or is one operating system in a better position (or putting its developers in a better position) to succeed with users?

JN: It’s a replay of the old tension between closed and open systems. Closed can be more tightly integrated and tends to have better usability because the entire system is architected as a whole. Open tends to be more unruly and confusing, but also offers a wider selection of choices. You could say Mac vs. Windows, or iOS vs. Android. Same basic issues. Windows won the former of these contests, and Android seems to be gaining ground in mobile.

The history lesson says that Windows eventually did emphasize usability and a stricter set of design guidelines starting around the time of Windows 95. But it’s taken them more than 15 years to overcome the legacy of bad usability in early Windows. You can’t just retrofit a strong user experience on top of a confused architecture. The peanut butter theory of design is false. (It claims that if you smear a thick enough layer on top, you can hide the taste of what’s below.)

In our current user testing, Android scores fairly well, but not as good as iPhone. For example, Android phones have several dedicated hard buttons (such as a menu button) that could theoretically help users do better than the iPhone with its single, overloaded button. Sadly, Android’s buttons are used inconsistently across devices and apps. As a result, users never know what each button will do, and thus never learn to use them or depend on them. Much stricter enforcement of design guidelines will be needed for Android to realize a usability advantage from its buttons.

That was one of the lessons from Macintosh software in the 1980s: developers who complied with the guidelines got better reviews and more customers, whereas inconsistent software got dinged by the Mac magazines. Because most early Mac software worked about the same, users could transfer their skills from one application to the next, and Mac owners bought about twice as many applications as PC owners.

Editor’s note: Read part II of the interview now.

Before we get into the iPad 2 details, a quick rant if I may.  Apple has long been criticized (yes, that’s an Oatmeal link) for having little loyalty to early adopters. Price drops, product launches, and planned obsolescence are often called as being pre-set in a manner in which to capitalize profits at the benefit of the company.  Last I checked Apple is a for-profit company.  As an advertiser I envy the customer loyalty that Apple has built that is able to create such a premium for early adopters.

The biggest problem with the common conspiracy theory that Apple is intentionally delaying features in products is that Google is making a huge dent in Apple’s smart phone market share. Apple wouldn’t allow that if they had the pipeline – or ability – to crank out products faster.  I’d love to continue this debate in the comments section below – but for now, I digress.

There’s a lot of news articles claiming today is the iPad 2 release day.  To be perfectly clear, today is the announcement from Apple but iPad 2’s won’t be available for purchase until next week.

So what’s different about the iPad 2?

• Front and rear cameras (I can’t imagine using my iPad as a giant, awkward camera)
• Thinner and lighter (Ok, the weight is a bit of a complaint for me, especially compared with my wife’s Kindle)
• Faster processor (Always nice, but apps like TweetDeck seem to have more stability problems than anything else)
• Expanded MobileMe capability (I don’t use MobileMe but always love cloud computing. Side note, the service is expected to be free.)

Need More Cowbell iPad 2?

• Pictures of Apple setting the stage for the iPad 2 event.
• 100+ news articles in the past 24 hours on Apple’s iPad 2
• We’ve also blogged pretty heavily about everything iPad, including app testing if you’re looking for more detail.

Will I be upgrading?  No.  Should you run out and buy the iPad 2?  Well, unless you’re looking to pickup more uTest projects (and we have a lot in the pipeline), probably not.  According to VentureBeat, an Apple insider said that the iPad 3 (yes, three!) is set to launch later in 2011 and the iPad 3 is the model to get excited about.