On Monday, Hewlett-Packard unveiled the next generation of printers. ePrint printers are web-enabled, work in the cloud, and will print from e-mail. In addition, users can store documents or files in the cloud for direct printing on demand. Prices start at $99.
The HP printers are the first with the ability to talk to the Google cloud without needing a local proxy PC or web appliance. That means people can access Google Docs, photos and calendar directly from their printers. Companies like Yahoo, Facebook and Reuters are also making print apps that work with the new machines.
“This is HP making printers relevant again. Over the last few years, printers were increasingly irrelevant,” said Rob Enderle, principal analyst at the Enderle Group. “People are living on the web and printers were an anachronism looking back to the past before we had the web. By integrating the web into printers, suddenly they are relevant again.”
Relevant ePrint Usage
HP offers several “relevant” examples of how consumers can use the web-enabled printers with the ePrint platform. A mother and son can print drawings they created on the iPad. Or users can print from mobile devices like the Palm Pre or BlackBerry smartphone and pick up the documents at a FedEx Office store.
The HP ePrint printers come with a unique e-mail address that lets consumers print a document the same way they would send an e-mail message. Consumers can also send Microsoft Office documents, Adobe PDFs, JPEG images, and other file types using HP’s ePrintCenter. Documents are sent to the ePrintCenter’s e-mail address, which handles the image and sends it to an ePrint printer.
“As much as we talk about iPad and tablets, people don’t move from one type of thing to another very quickly. In fact, we’ve been talking about the paperless office since the early… More info
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