Printing from the cloud

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On Hewlett Packard's invitation I was sent to Hong Kong earlier this week. Inside the walls of the historic Shaw Studios, HP launched their new range of printers; they call them 'web-aware' printers. So what does that mean?

It means each of the HP's new printers above Rs 7,000 will come with an email id. If you need the printer to print, you can just send an email to it remotely from your phone or an iPad. No complicated cables or drivers needed, not even a computer is required... Just go to HP's cloud-based ePrintCenter. and register your printer, it will give an id to your printer which can even be changed later. You could be holidaying in Hawaii and yet be able to give a print to your CA in India by sending an email to his printer from your smart phone.

I thought of testing this out. I wrote a mail on my BlackBerry and emailed it to the printer's id and it took less than 2 minutes for it to print. Apart from text mails you can even email PDF files, jpegs and Microsoft Office documents to these printers. But one thing bothered me here, if these printers have an email id there is a chance of it getting spam which will then drain my expensive ink and even waste paper. HP too, it seems thought about it.

These printers have been given complicated ids - a mixture of alphabets and numbers. You can also have a designated white list of ids that can send the print to your printer. HP even claims to have an efficient spam filter that will block the spam mails. But in spite of all these measures these printers are not 100% spam-proof and that can be a big bummer. Also you will not be able to create simple and memorable addresses and if you have a closed list you will not be able to print from an id which is not on the list.

HP also launched its own version of an application store designed to work with its printers, enabling customers to print directly from the applications. All these applications can be accessed and downloaded from the printers screen or the ePrintCenter. This apple like application store will have a mix of free and paid-for applications. There are applications on education, news, photo sites which can be directly accessed and given a printout from the cloud or Internet. You can quickly get a print of Sudoku puzzle or recipe, or to catch up on news headlines.

Bottom line: Printing has gone to the cloud but in this age of portable devices does it really matter? Now, that will be fun to watch!