Mobile Printing

Since the release of the iPad in 2010, the market has become awash with a variety of mobile print solutions including Apple’s AirPrint, HP ePrint, Ricoh’s HotSpot printing and Google Cloud Print to name but a few. Many printer vendors are banking on the soaring demand for smartphones and tablets to revitalise the opportunity for printing, in the office, at home and on the move.

With projections that smart phone sales will reach 300 million worldwide in 2010 and up to 55 million tablets forecast to be sold this year, the opportunity is significant, even if only a small proportion of users actually need or want to print. But as the two walled gardens of printers and mobile devices come together, are vendors in danger of over complicating an essentially simple process?

The mobile and print worlds are remarkably similar in many ways. In the mobile world, data and applications are increasingly the keys to opening up new revenue opportunities for device manufacturers and platform providers. In the printer world, pages are king as it is the ink on pages that drives revenue more than the hardware. The collision of two markets driven by proprietary platforms has created challenges in developing universal printing capabilities across mobile platforms.

So faced with a diverse mobile device platform landscape, it is unsurprising that it has spawned such a wide array of mobile printing solutions from printer vendors. Most of these solutions are predicated on sending a document as an email attachment, via the cloud, to a web-enabled printer which has an associated email address. The exception to this is Apple’s AirPrint which currently supports printing to HP “cloud-aware” printers only – which include HP’s OfficeJet, LaserJet Pro and PhotoSmart printers.

HP’s head start

HP has had a clear head start in the market, being the first (and so far only) printer vendor to offer direct support through AirPrint. But what are the options for businesses, not using HP printers, that want a reliable and universal way to print to office devices from smart phones or tablets? One solution is HP’s ePrint Enterprise, part of an HP Managed Print Service which enables Blackberry users to print to any network enabled printer.

HP has also just announced that ePrint Enterprise now also support iPhones and will be extended to Android devices in May 2011. Ricoh and Xerox also have their own solutions which require emailing a document to a registered printer. One notable and recent addition to the mobile printing fray is from EFI, the provider of Fiery controllers for MFPs from a variety of manufacturers – including Canon, Xerox, Ricoh and Konica Minolta.