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  (Source: Google Mobile Blog)

  (Source: Google Mobile Blog)
Allows smartphone users to print mobile docs and Gmail e-mails and attachments

We've known about Google's printing-from-the-cloud ambitions in Chrome for more than half a year now. As of yesterday, those ambitions are finally becoming a reality.

The Google Mobile Blog announced that the company began rolling out a beta version of Google Cloud Print for mobile documents and Gmail for mobile yesterday. The functionality allows smartphone users to print a document open in Google Docs or an email in Gmail -- as well as certain attachments -- right from the device.

The new feature will be available to English-speaking users in the U.S., who are running devices that support HTML5 -- Android 2.1+ and iOS 3+. Before it can work, a printer must be connected to Google Cloud Print, so far only on a Windows PC. Mac and Linux support are on their way. Additional support can be found on the Google Cloud Print help page.

While it may come in handy, this is only a sliver of the full functionality Google intends to implement with Cloud Print. The software is designed to eliminate the need for different drivers for every printing device. The final goal is to allow any app to print to any printer without the use of wires or direct communication, which, if done right, has the potential to disrupt the tethered nature of printing.

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This article is over a month old, voting and posting comments is disabled
By bupkus on 1/25/2011 4:56:56 PM , Rating: 2
I'm using a brother HL-2170W wireless printer, obviously not attached directly to a computer. What now?

Also, I tend to encourage my clients using notebooks to select networked printers or routers (ASUS WL-520gU) that can provide USB ports for networking printer support via dd-wrt. Can/will Google's cloud support IP addressed printers?




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