But AT&T has a mixed track record of keeping up with the demands of the iPhone. In some parts of the country, their service is great. In other parts, it’s pretty terrible. Many AT&T customers have long wanted to switch to America’s other big phone network: Verizon. The problem with Verizon is that it uses a completely different cellular phone standard called CDMA. Using the iPhone on Verizon required a different hardware design, and that was only after Apple got out of their exclusive deal with AT&T for selling the iPhone.

Today both Verizon and Apple finally delivered: the long awaited CDMA iPhone. Starting February 3, Verizon customers can start using the iPhone on America’s other big network. Are you planning to get a Verizon iPhone?

Verizon owners will mostly have the same phone experience, but with a few small changes. First, the Verizon network doesn’t support using both voice and data functions at the same time. That means that if you’re surfing the web and you receive a phone call, your data will stop cold until your call has concluded. Over at TechCrunch, MG Siegler says this won’t be a problem because nobody ever uses data while on a call. Here at blog.utest, I claim he’s wrong because I do it all the time.

The second big change is that because the CDMA iPhone doesn’t have a GSM radio, it won’t work internationally. If you travel overseas a lot, especially to countries where GSM is dominant, your Verizon phone will be a glorified iPod Touch.

But it’s not all doom and gloom, because Verizon customers will have access to a really cool tethering feature. With a Verizon iPhone, you’ll be able to create a WiFi hotspot for up to 5 computers at once. Just enable the hotspot feature on your iPhone and start surfing on your laptop.

Final trivia – why is GSM so popular in Europe while CDMA is popular in the United States? Patents. The GSM patents are owned by Ericcson – a Swedish company. The CDMA patents are owned by Qualcomm – an American company.

With all that in mind, uTest — along with HP, Dell, Microsoft, AT&T, FedEx, JetBlue, Samsung and others — was among the very first businesses to showcase their products on LinkedIn’s new Company Product Pages (launched yesterday 11/2/10).

LinkedIn has more than 80 million members worldwide and launched Company Pages to make it easier for businesses to engage with all these professionals with a dynamic, content-rich profile of record. In addition to product and service recommendations, businesses can display videos, featured product information and targeted ads on their Company Pages to drive engagement and interaction.

It’s still in the works, but check out our company services page here and recommend us if you feel inclined!
(And be sure to Follow Us On LinkedIn – it’s the only way into the ‘in crowd’ .)

What an honor it is to have tech giant Jeff Papows as this month’s guest for Testing the Limits. As the former President and CEO of

A frequent guest of CNN, Fox and other television networks, Jeff is also a successful author – having sold more than 80,00 copies of his first book “Enterprise.com: Information Leadership in the Digital Age.” In this interview, we ask Jeff about his latest book Glitch: The Hidden Impact of Faulty Software in addition to other hot topics in the world of software quality. Check back tomorrow for Part II.

uTest: Let’s start from the beginning: What prompted you to write this book? Was it a bug that just made you snap one day, or did you reach a tipping point after years of observation?

JP: Well in the end, busy CEO’s write books when circumstances and industry trends pressure you to make a “complete” intellectual contribution to a big problem or trend that you feel compelled to respond to.  There are three issues at the root of a meta-level industry crisis I feel is mounting at present.

• Technology saturation or ubiquity – As of the first of this year we have a trillion devices connected to the Internet, a billion transistors and or microprocessors at work for literally every human being on the planet and thirty billion RFID tags in motion communications with our computing typologies.  Technology is not just a business to business staple anymore – it is truly part of the social fabric of the way we work and live.  With this kind of complexity curve and economic contribution any large scale disruption is monumental.

• Loss of intellectual capital – About 70% of the world’s application inventory and the platform for the majority of our transaction processing is written in Cobol and run on IBM mainframes.  The other side of the Dot Com bubble bursting is that graduating computer science majors and or math majors are off by about 37% and those that are graduating are interested and versed in Java, C++, etc. not Cobol.  Also, for the first time in our careers/lifetimes, C.S. engineers are retiring, aging and dying.  So how do we replace that codified knowledge from walking out our doors?

• Mergers & acquisitions – In the period following the financial downturn of 2008, the financial services sector has gone through a lot of consolidation.  The result is in part the added complexity of slamming together these complex back office systems in our major banks and financial institutions.

When you combine these factors together, the recipe is complete for the digital equivalent of the perfect storm.  To answer the question, that is why I wrote “Glitch”.

uTest: Your book deals with glitches and bugs from both ends of the spectrum – some serious, some funny and some that are almost unbelievable. What was the worst (as in most damaging) glitch that you came across while researching?

JP: That’s easy.  The human suffering and deaths caused by software glitches in Varions Cancer radiation medical equipment is the worst!

uTest: What was the worst glitch that didn’t make it into the book?

JP: Very recently in the past couple of weeks you have the Verizon glitch where bugs in our handsets were billing us for data consumption that wasn’t in fact taking place.  Hence Verizon’s fifty million dollar rebate to customers last week. Also in that same week, an unarmed drone Predator aircraft was hacked and flown around in restricted airspace in Washington D.C. (of all places) for a number of minutes before control was regained.  That’s fairly frightening.

uTest: You recently said that if we are to reverse this trend, it will require a better approach to software development. Can you give our readers a sneak preview of what this entails?

JP: The bottom line is this is a very large problem that is not going to be solved by throwing more bodies at the problem.  The solution lies in many possible forms of automated policy management and I.T. best practices or governance in various forms.  We have to innovate and automate – not slow down the pace or work harder.

uTest: The SEC is set to deliver their report on the “flash crash” in the next week or two. Do you expect faulty software to be included in the report? Is it fair to say that financial glitches like this are potentially the most serious type?

JP: Yes I do expect software to be in the basic DNA of this problem set.  Financial “glitches” may indeed be the broadest category of problems.  Those as mentioned above are as serious or more so in health care, but not as pervasive.

uTest: Aside from the financial impact of software bugs and glitches, you write a lot about the negative impact they have on brands. What’s your number one piece of advice for companies that have to deal with their glitches in the public spotlight?

JP: Own up to your part.  From TD Bank blocking its own customer’s ATM access to Toyota, defensive denial doesn’t restore consumer confidence.  Companies that find themselves in the cross hairs need to accept responsibility and talk about how they are going to fix the problem, not pretend the problems aren’t there.

uTest: Your book deals with the coming shortage of people with IT and computer skills (a subject we’ve discussed as well). Is there any way that trend reverses in the next 5-10 years? If not, what are some the major consequences? How can we reverse this?

JP: I think our industry’s weight, financial contributions and scale will again make it an ultra popular career target, but it will take several years for the trend or downturn in C.S. graduates to be reversed and for that new wave of engineers to enter the work place.

uTest: You cite the fact that there are over a billion embedded transistors for every person on the planet and over one trillion network devices in use. How much more complicated does software quality become with the explosion of mobile technology?

JP: The multiplication effect on the strain on our back office data, web access and typology from mobile computing can’t be over stated.  Moreover there are problems exploding with the quality and fidelity of the mobile computing experience itself.  We are running out of broadband spectrum and the proof point lies in the mind-numbing number of dropped calls every day and not just for iPhone and ATT users.

Editor’s note: Be sure to check back tomorrow for part II of our interview with Jeff Papows.

Apple recently revealed that there is a fundamental flaw in their method for calculating how many signal bars to display.  And we have the iPhone 4 (and its “learn to hold your phone the right way” fiasco) to thank for bringing this software snafu to light.

CNN Money shares the following details from Apple:

“Upon investigation, we were stunned to find that the formula we use to calculate how many bars of signal strength to display is totally wrong,” Apple wrote in a statement posted on its website. “Our formula, in many instances, mistakenly displays 2 more bars than it should for a given signal strength.”

That means, for example, that iPhones sometimes display four bars when they should be displaying two. Apple said users reporting a significant drop in bars when they hold their iPhone 4 are probably in an area of “very weak signal strength” but were unaware of that because the phone displayed four to five bars.

“Their big drop in bars is because their high bars were never real in the first place,” the company said.

Perhaps most surprising, Apple disclosed that the problem is not confined to the iPhone 4.  The faulty formula has been present in every iPhone model since the 2007 original.  Questions remain about whether the issue is strictly software-related, or if it also involved hardware problems.  However, Apple has said it will release a free software update in the next several weeks to fix the glitch. It will use a new formula recommended by AT&T.

The hackers claim they reported the flaw to AT&T before sending their discovery to the fine folks at Gawker. AT&T, on the other hand, was not pleased to see their security problems appear in a popular tech blog at all, and had this to say in an email to their iPad customers:

On June 7 we learned that unauthorized computer “hackers” maliciously exploited a function designed to make your iPad log-in process faster by pre-populating an AT&T authentication page with the email address you used to register your iPad for 3G service.

…

The hackers deliberately went to great efforts with a random program to extract possible ICC-IDs and capture customer email addresses.

So who’s to blame for a problem like this? Is it AT&T, or do the hackers themselves deserve some of the blame for the public way they handled their disclosure? Give us your thoughts below.

Starting this month, AT&T will now limit the amount of data an iPhone or iPad may consume in a given month.  The caps start at 200MB, but for an additional fee you can have all the way up to 2GB.  Existing users will continue to have an unlimited data plan for now, but new contracts will not have that option going forward.

AT&T says that 98% of their customers use less than 2GB of data per month, which means that most people won’t hit the top usage cap.  However, many people will still opt for the lower 200MB data cap because it will actually be cheaper than their current unlimited iPhone data plan.  That means software developers have an interesting new challenge on their hands – bandwidth optimization.

Americans, and American developers, have taken for granted that the iPhone can consume data freely without limit.  The only reason that an app can’t be too chatty over the network is that mobile data transfers are still incredibly slow compared to regular broadband.

Still, many people will now demand their apps be even more data thrifty.  That means software testers have a new testing question to consider – how data hungry is an app?  Just as memory leaks indicate a lack of diligence around memory management, “data leaks” can indicate that an app sends or receives more data than necessary.  Here are some reasons why:

• Not using compression when possible
• Designing chatty API protocols
• Sending large data components multiple times when only once is necessary
• Sending data for processing within an app rather than processing it on the server
• Not using caching

This makes me want to go dust off my old 14.4kbps modem and remember what slow Internet used to be like.  What other ideas have I missed?

I sat in on several of these sessions and heard a number of important topics being discussed that will have major implications for the future of mobile apps and mobile commerce.  These debates included:

• Android vs. iPhone vs. Blackberry vs. Symbian
• Free vs. Paid apps
• OEM app stores vs. Carrier app stores

But perhaps the most interesting, fierce and recurring debate that I heard at CTIA was around the topic of… native apps (eg: separate iPhone, Android and Blackberry apps) vs. a single app for the mobile web. Which approach to “mobile” will win out in the end?  How long will it take for a winner to emerge? What are the pros and cons of each? If you’re not familiar with this all-important topic, check out this report from ReadWriteWeb (pro-mobile web), this post from SmoothPlanet (pretty neutral), and this article from CNET (pro-native app).

We’ll be writing extensively on this subject in the coming weeks, but I’d be interested in hearing your thoughts.  Have you already had this debate inside your company?  If so, which path did you choose and why? And I’ll leave you with a great quote that I heard yesterday that all mobile developers should take to heart:

Don’t worry about making the mobile web… focus on making the web mobile.

Ultimately, this is true regardless of whether you choose to pursue a native app strategy or a mobile web strategy.  The real goal is to deliver your content, your features, your functionality to your users, but on their terms.

There are more than a few skeptics, including Jason Kincaid (@jasonkincaid) over at TechCrunch.  As Kincaid states (with a bit of help from Google’s Andy Rubin):

If it sounds too good to be true, that’s because it probably is. Andy Rubin, Google VP of Engineering (and the man in charge of Android) has already shared his skepticism, saying, “There is always a dream that you could write [a program] once and [have it] run anywhere and history has proven that that dream has not been fully realised and I am sceptical that it ever will be“. To put it another way, this is a pipe dream from carriers looking to loosen Apple’s stranglehold over mobile applications and there’s very little chance that it’s going to work.

The reasons Kincaid thinks the WAC won’t work out include:

1. Fragmentation:  Every device maker and carrier rolls out the latest system upgrades at their own pace.  Will they really coordinate their schedules so closely that developers don’t have to tweak their apps to work with each configuration?
2. App Trade-Offs:  Will app makers really trade horsepower for compatibility?  It sounds good in principal, but that’s always a tough pill to swallow for developers who want to create the next killer app.
3. App Store Arms Race:  Beyond PR and marketing bragging rights, does it really matter if your app store of choice has 10,000 apps or 100,000?  In short, no.

This is an interesting concept (who doesn’t love open, unified standards), but there’s an enormous gap between theory and practice.  And that gaping chasm is filled with failed industry standard initiatives that looked great in the press releases that announced them.  What do you think — will WAC work?  If not, why?

So what does the iPad mean for developers, testers, and Apple users?  Here are a few thoughts:

Layout now matters for iPhone developers.
Up until now, an iPhone app was one size fits all.  Every iPhone has the same resolution, meaning apps didn’t have to worry about scaling up or down.  Not anymore!  The iPad is a larger device, but it runs the same iPhone apps.  While it can automatically scale up an app designed for the iPhone, the results are kind of ugly.  The bigger screen real estate opens a lot of interesting possibilities, but for iPhone developers now is the time you need to start worrying about how your app will look on a larger screen that isn’t 480×320.

New interface means new challenges.
If it’s not enough that the iPad comes in a different size, now developers will also have a slew of new interface widgets to work with.  Whether or not those widgets will be available on the iPhone remains to be seen, but whatever the case developers will have their hands full making sure their apps look correct on each platform.

Testers needed!
Both of those first two points mean testers will be needed now more than ever.  Making sure apps work correctly on all of Apple’s devices will be even more challenging, and good testers will be critical.  Of course, we know of a software testing company that’s all about matching mobile developers with smart testers.

Other thoughts:

Custom hardware creates uncertainty.
With the iPad, Apple is introducing the 1GHz Apple A4 microprocessor.  Details are unknown at this point, but Apple is clearly aiming to regain some of the hardware mojo they lost when they switched to Intel several years ago.  Using a custom chip likely allows them to do things like boost the battery life (10 hours!), but it also introduces uncertainty about compatibility.  Most iPhone apps should be hardware agnostic, but time will tell how true that really is.

No flash, no fun?
Apple left Flash off the iPhone, claiming that Flash was too power hungry to include.  However, the iPad also appears to lack Flash, meaning it will still be impossible to enjoy sites like Hulu and Vimeo on the iPad.

GSM 3G means AT&T in the US
There’s little love for AT&T’s iPhone service in the United States, and pre-launch rumors were all over the place about Apple supporting other carriers.  With the iPad, they do – kind of.  They’re launching the iPad with a pay as you go data plan using AT&T – which means it’s optional and there are no contracts.  They’re also unlocking the SIM, meaning you could theoretically use it with T-Mobile (the other GSM carrier in the US).  Of course, nobody has any idea how that would work at this point.

The App Store abounds.
The iPad still seems to require the app store.  There’s no word on whether or not apps can be loaded without the app store – something that Apple originally created so that they could review apps to make sure they were safe for AT&T’s network.  Since the iPad doesn’t require AT&T anymore (and some models will even lack 3G support entirely), it’s not clear what purpose the app store serves.

Hardware interface unknowns.
Steve Jobs hinted at the ability to use a projector, and Engadget is reporting that you will be able to purchase an external keyboard and camera.  But according to Apple, the only input/output mechanism (other than headphones and a SIM card slot) is the dock connector.  Time will tell how those pieces will work together and how expandable they will be. (edit: maybe Bluetooth? Dongles?)

iBooks oh my!
Apple is also introducing iBooks – their new online book store.  Much like iTunes, iBooks could completely reinvent the publishing industry.  Books will use the ePub format, which hopefully means it will be easy for anyone to write and share books and documents for the iPad.

What do you think of the iPad?  Will you be first in line in 60 days when it goes on sale?  Do you have $499 burning a hole in your pocket?  Tell us what you think below!

Known as one of the most serious telecom bugs in history, more than 75 million calls were not connected during 9 hours, an estimated $60 million loss.

Dennis Burke of California Polytechnic said it best: “The Jan. 1990 incident showed how bugs in self-healing software can bring down healthy systems, and the difficulty of detecting obscure load- and time-dependent defects in software.”

Speaking of “load defects,” AT&T — after signing up to be exclusive U.S. provider of iPhone service — has recently come under fire for the quality of its network coverage. Businessweek‘s top headlines read:

• An AT&T Mystery: Abrupt New York iPhone Shutdown
• AT&T Mulls Plans to Deal with iPhone Data Demand
• Can AT&T Meet iPhone Network Demands?

In light of this bug-iversary, I can’t help but wonder if more testing should have been done before AT&T took on the massive data demands of modern 3G smartphones? What do you think?