Today somebody pointed out to me an excellent advance in usability testing efficiency - Morae lets you do all the camera work, screen detection, comment observation, and data stream synchronization with a piece of software and a webcam. It's got other features as well - most notably remote team members can watch the test from the comfort of their own desk. Very nice.
Of course, this won't work for a mobile device. It would obviously work for testing on a simulator, but see our overview of mobile usability testing for details on why I think that isn't the way to go for full testing.
I've writen elsewhere about usability labs-in-a-box designed for mobile, but that doesn't compete with the convenience of Morae.
There is an excellent possibility on the horizon, if enough people just asked for it. And the management listened. TestQuest is a software solution for automating unit testing of mobile devices. You write generic scripts and literally plug in a phone; the software runs the script for the device and records everything including the screen shot.
Very useful - but they currently assume that carriers and similarly-sized organizations are their only market. When I spoke with them, there was no interest in setting up testing centers for mobile developers, let alone anything related to usability testing.
Regardless, TestQuest technology could reasonably be altered to, like Morae, automatically collect usability testing data when using mobile devices. This would advance mobile usability significantly.