We explain how you can print from the smartphone, tablet and other devices. In our guide, you will learn how to feed your printer with documents and use them from anywhere without a PC and laptop.
What is a Chromebook?
After the laptop comes the tablet, and the deployment times of the fully developed PC in the study are increasingly "manageable". The small devices are impressive because of their ease of use and the extremely comfortable way to maintain them during surfing.
Produce solutions
However, if you want to print an order confirmation, a code or an info, the multitude of users will go back to the laptop or go to a PC. Whether Windows Phone, iOS or Android - the "print" button the user is usually looking for in vain.
Hosted Based Printer
The airlines have set a good example in this matter years ago, and they allow check-in via QR code via the mobile phone display. And if you only want to see the current Bundesliga table results or Wikipedia, you can also do without the print button quite well. However, there is general hope for the "pressure-driven rest of us".
Google Cloud Print
The fact that it is not so well-ordered with the printing on the micro devices lies with the current product design of the equipment and operating system manufacturers. A look in the past shows that this was not always the case.
Earlier in the hands of mobile data processing - Palm - the mobile computers were printing commands, and they could even connect directly to larger office printers, such as a Hewlett Packard LaserJet 2100, without installing drivers or plugging cables >
This was only a few centimeters away from the infrared sensor of the printer, but it provided at least stunning views and open mouths at the work colleagues. Microsoft also gave the former Windows CE adequate
Pressure bases, since, like Palm, they also represent the professional user in the business environment as a target group. With "JetCet Print Professional", the CE user was able to output virtually every document on a printer, even in color. With the triumphant success of iOS and Android, the manufacturers' way of looking at their customers changed.
The largest user group today is more interested in fun applications and gadgets, because of office packages or electronic devices. Nevertheless, away from Angry Birds & Co, a much more modern and powerful printing environment for handhelds has emerged.
The user's first port should be the volume or store that is common to the device. For many printers or combination devices, the user finds the appropriate app there, usually even free of charge. Brother is leading the way with a good example and delivers a print and scan software for virtually every platform, also for the Windows Phone 7.x and higher.
But also other, mostly well-known manufacturers, offer special driver and program solutions for different device types. For older types of printers it usually looks rather bad because hardly a manufacturer makes the effort to prepare the software for the old printers for new devices.
That there is, for example, for the Windows Phone, a printer app from Brother, does not necessarily mean that now could be printed from every conceivable place. Most apps do not see a print output, so no print is possible.
If, however, an application stores files, such as texts or pictures, to the phone itself or to the storage service such as "Sky Drive", "iCloud" or "Google Drive", printing is usually possible. The Brother "iPrint and Scan" app allows the user to print jobs from stored images, from the built-in camera, or "Sky-Drive" files after program startup.
Printer queue on the Internet
Although the selection possibilities for the printout are clearly limited, the application makes a very intuitive and practical impression. However, at least in conjunction with the MFC-J5910DW, there were some color differences when printing Office documents. The printer connection proved to be extremely stable in the test.
We changed in the network configuration the type of connection from WLAN to LAN and in the meantime adapted the IP address of the printer. The app has always been able to discover and control the multifunction device. In addition to printing, the program offers scanning via multi-function devices. The image is loaded directly to the smartphone and processed there.
No driver installation required
Unfortunately the developers of the solution did not provide a scan preview. A few settings for contrast and brightness would also be needed to get better results.
The only selection available to the user is the scan size. Fortunately, there is the setting "Auto", which automatically sets the limits. Storage of the scan as a PDF file is only possible with cloud storage services, at least under Windows Phone.
If the user wants to save the image locally on the mobile phone, he must save it in JPEG format, without the own definition of a file name. Overall, the solutions from Epson, Brother or Hewlett Packard for iOS, Android and Windows Phone enrich the smartphone or the tablet by the lack of printing.
Apple AirPrint
For elaborate picture and text work, however, hardly anyone will be satisfied with the possibilities. Since the data exchange is typically initiated via the WLAN, the work ends at the end of the radio range at the latest.
Google has already propagated the mobile office over the Internet for quite some time. With "Drive", "Mail" and "Docs", three important foundations have been created for the professional processing of data directly via the browser. At the latest since Google's "Chromebook" (see box) also offered its own notebook platform, the Internet company also had to deal with the issue of printing.
In the development of device drivers once again from the beginning to start, that seemed too elaborate. Instead, Google managed to get manufacturers to add the necessary printing control directly to the devices.
For the vast majority of non-Google Cloud Print (GCP) -based printers, the Internet company is offering the "Google Cloud Print Connector" in Google Chrome, which can be used to provide local printers via the OS X or Windows computer Code>
To connect a local, non-cloud-enabled printer to the GCP service in Windows XP SP3 and later, or OS X, the user must first install the latest version of the Google Chrome browser. The menu for the setting is symbolized on the upper, left-hand window with three bars.
In the "Settings" section, the user then clicks "Advanced settings" at the bottom of the window, not "Extensions" in the section selection. Adding the desired printers under "Google Cloud Print" is self-explanatory.
The integration of a cloudable printer is done according to the manufacturer's instructions. Since many printers have a LAN / WLAN communication interface, there is no need to have a computer running the print jobs - that saves energy.
A printer administration that controls Google users' own printers, saves the centralized printer queue, or releases printers for other Google users can be found at google.com/cloudprint.
If you want to use the Cloud Print as a Windows service as an administrator, Google will be glad to provide documentation for Windows and Linux. Parallel use with the current print solution is guaranteed in any case, according to the manufacturer.
The most important application for the print service is the browser itself - regardless of where the user is located, whether on a classic PC, a tablet or a smartphone. If the user clicks on "Print" on the Google Drive, the list of his own or shared printers appears.
Google Chrome is not required. In a recent Firefox or Internet Explorer, the call to print functionality and printer management succeeds as well. If the user wants to print a web page himself, the printer selection only succeeds in Chrome 23 or higher. Some other applications already use the GCP for printing.
What's so impressive about the Google version is the fact that no user needs to pound with the specifications of a printer driver. Share with other Google users is very simple, the transparency in the rendering, who can now access what is probably better.
In addition, Google, in conjunction with the Brother MFC-J5910DW as a cloud-enabled device, offers only the simplest setting options for printers. For an A4 / A3 printer, the settings are reduced to just the paper size, edge size, number, edge / landscape, and whether it is plain or glossy.
Color settings and resolution are not available. For the Hewlett Packard LaserJet 1010, which is connected via the Windows connector as a "Hosted Based Printer" (see box), Google Print Cloud provides an almost endless list of print settings.
And as with so many applications that Google has been offering to its users for years, the Cloud Print service is still in beta. It is impossible to say whether the service is offered in this form and is still offered free of charge.
However, because a tight connection exists between the printers and the Google user account, and Google caches the items in the printer queue, users who are more concerned about protecting their own data should rather avoid using this service. The dependency on the availability of Google printer queues is a risk to be considered as well.
It goes without saying that Apple also provides its devices with a modern and simple print interface. Like Google, Apple tries to animate the manufacturers to integrate the interface for AirPrint directly into the printer or multifunction device.
Many manufacturers, including Canon, Dell, EPSON, Hewlett Packard, Brother, Lexmark, Kyocera, Samsung and Fuji Xerox have adapted some of their systems accordingly. However, unlike the Google version, the Apple devices and the AirPrint-compatible printers must be located within the same WLANs because there is no central air-print printer queue used over the Internet.
Thus, all concerns about data security are also significantly lower. AirPrint comes without any protection - if you have the LAN / WLAN access, you can also use the printer with its iPad, iPhone 3GS or later, third-generation iPod touch or new and via MAC OS X Lion and OS X Mountain Lion .
A driver installation is not necessary. If the user wishes to send a print job from the Safari browser via an iPad, he presses the "Action" button on the desired page and then selects "Print."
All printers available in the vicinity are available for selection and allow for a clear number of settings such as media type, page size or orientation. Status messages, such as the toner or the ink are soon running out, are also displayed on the user's iPad or iPhone.
To influence the current printing process, the user has to press the Home button twice while the printer is still working. In the list of current applications, the entry "Print center" appears, with which an expression could also be canceled.
If the printer does not have its own WLAN interface, it may be possible to share it over the WLAN network if the device is directly connected via an AirPort Time Capsule, AirPort Extreme or AirPort Express base station Code>
Corresponding short instructions are offered by Apple on its homepage. But even without the WLAN access point coming directly from the house Apple, an integration of an Ethernet addressed printer into the WLAN is possible without problems. At least the printers also worked with us through other access points.
AirPrint is based on the Bonjour protocol (see box), a system for the automatic detection of network services in an IP network. Because this is a non-routable Layer 2 protocol, only AirPrint and AirPlay devices can discover within the same subnet.
If access is to be possible via several network segments, the administrator must inevitably build a "Bonjour gateway". The company Aerohive offers a free gateway on VMware ESX 4 and higher on the Internet. The integration of printers, which do not have directly via AirPrint, Apple has not planned at all.
The developer Stephan Mühl from the Unterfränkischen Mömbris, however, has developed with the "Airprint Activator for Windows" a variant, which allows to control Windows-enabled printers via a service via Apple AirPrint. A jailbreak of the iOS device, ie an illegal adaptation of the iOS operating system, is not necessary for this.
It is only necessary to install Bonjour on the Windows PC to enable the Guest account. The Windows firewall must also allow the user to configure the AirPrint software to communicate with UDP via ports 9100, 631 under TCP and 5353.
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