While many consider the Apple iPhone and iPad consumption devices, these have quickly become cool content-creation devices but it’s difficult to get that content off your device. Brother International is trying to fix that with a new iPhone app which enables printing.
This isn’t the first Apple iPhone printing app, but most other apps just focus on photo printing and the Brother iPhone app can do photo printing and document scanning over a WiFi network.
Photo printing is a big need for the Apple iPhone devices, especially with the new iPhone 4. The device has a 5-megapixel camera with a flash and touch-to-zoom capabilities, but it’s still kind of a pain to have to transfer photos over to your computer before printing.
The Brother iPhone app also enables scanning directly to iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad. The company said the app will automatically search for supported devices on a WiFi network so you don’t need a computer or drivers to handle your business.
The early response has been fairly positive but a few comments complain about the lack of PDF support and that it’s only compatible with a narrow band of Brother printers. The app is relatively brand new though, so I’m sure Brother will add features and enhance compatibility over the next few weeks and months.
As smartphone become increasingly prevelant, we’re going to see more of these printing apps. Hewlett-Packard and Research In Motion recently teamed up to provide a way for BlackBerry users to print over the air without a computer.
HP may be going nuts with smartphones and printers, as the company may use the webOS platform it acquired in the Palm buy and put that in its printers. This seems a bit odd at first but a nice user interface layer could go a long way to making using a printer a better experience.
– Download Brother iPrint & Scan for iPhone, iPad (free) [iTunes Link]