From handset to paper
Printing documents off your mobile phone involves only a little fiddling, writes
It’s fiddly enough to print from a desktop PC, let alone a phone. Paper jams, communication errors and empty cartridges have been a feature of computer life since the first home printers appeared 30 years ago. But at least your computer knows how to recognise a printer when it sees one. Your phone hasn’t a clue.
This is a legacy of the rush to digitise documents on to online clouds. Printing them has been on no-one’s agenda lately, save for the companies who actually make printers – and their focus has been mainly on trying to sell us expensive ink refills.
Yet with only a little fiddling, it is possible to send words, pictures and other data directly from your handset to almost any modern printer on your wi-fi network.
The easiest way of doing this is with an app designed for the purpose. Google has had its own service, Cloud Print, for several years but it never came fully to fruition and is being withdrawn at the end of this year.
Its departure has left the market to several independent vendors, the best of which is perhaps PrinterShare, which has versions available for Apple and Android phones.
Once installed, it can find all the emails, text messages, calendar entries and other documents to which your phone has access. Whether they are stored on the phone itself or on a cloud service like Gmail or Google Drive makes no difference; you just select the quantity and quality, and press the Print button. It’s arguably easier than printing from a computer since everything is in the same place.
It can find all the emails, text messages and other
documents to which your phone has access.
CMYK Pen: Every colour can be created by combining cyan, magenta, yellow and black. The CMYK process is used in printing to build up fullcolour images, and now you can use that same process to create full-colour art with this ballpoint pen. Change inks with the sliding selectors and get experimenting, doodling, sketching and crosshatching. £7.50, from www.suck.uk.com