Though printing photos from a cell phone only a few years ago would have been a monumental waste of ink that resulted in muddled, grainy “photos,” cell phone cameras have come so far in that short period that this type of printing is no longer a joke. To establish itself in the emerging market for mobile printing, HP has been testing the waters lately with a new iPhone application that allows iPhone and iPod Touch users to print directly from their phones.
In a tech demo at HP’s CES booth, a company representative used an ordinary iPhone loaded with the now freely available iPrint application to print photos from the phone in a matter of seconds. The phone zips its 2.0-megapixel photos across an ordinary Wi-Fi network to certain HP wireless-ready printers and begins printing immediately. HP sees the Wi-Fi route as a simpler alternative to the common Bluetooth method for sending photos from cell phones, which complicates the process with PIN codes and pairing.
At the moment, only HP printers are supported, and only modern models with Wi-Fi compatibility have the capability. More information can be found at HP’s iPrint page.
