I would be dissapointed if there are only 494 questions. The current version of GMATPrep likely has about 1400 questions, I know for sure that it has 750 quant questions and I am presuming a similar number for the Verbal as well. This would be a backward step. Unless GMAC plans to turn GMATPrep in to a profit venture by selling additional questions.
Let's hope the entire database has been replenished with new questions, although I am not too optimistic about that.
Here is my advice to GMAC in case they ever read this post:
1) Eliminate any overlap of questions in GMATPrep with all of the Official Guides and that includes past editions as well.
2) The questions that were tested in the last six years that have made it to the world of internet be officially released as part of the new GMATPrep and the official guides. Many of them have already appeared in GMATFocus.
3) Reorganize
the Official Guide ranking of the quant questions to reflect their actual difficulty level. The test writers have the data for what percent of the students got a certain question right. ETS used to publish this data for all the GRE questions. GMAT for some reason has never disclosed this information. My guess is that they don't want to do the work, they can hire me for free and I will do it.
4) Expand the number of computer adaptive tests that are part of the GMATPrep to at least four, six would be even better. This would free students of the poor third party CATs that have poorly written questions and scoring algorithms that are all over the place.
Dabral