Five Apps That Let You Print from Your Tablet Or Phone

Smart Printing For Smart Devices

Printing from smart devices has long been possible, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s easy or without aggravation. Printing apps work with varying degrees of ease of use, and few are free. Here are five apps, free and paid, that will let you print wirelessly from your device.

Print n Share For iPhone

One of the top-rated printing apps for the iPhone is called, simply, Print n Share. It’s not free: the download from the Apple iTunes App Store will run $8.99.

Once installed, and with the iPhone connected to a network via WiFi, the app will do all the work of configuring a connection to a printer. Six easy, one-touch buttons will let you print files, e-mail, Web pages, contacts and images either from a camera roll or new photos taken just to print. We tried it out, and literally within a few minutes of download, our phone was sending files to a printer on our network for printing.

PrinterShare Mobile Print For Android (Premium Key)

This is a $12.95 app that’s available for download from the Android Market. There are several printing apps available for the Android platform, but we chose this one because it works, and provides a straightforward, automated way to print through the network without going through a third-party service.

Once connected to a network over WiFi, print from your Android device by letting PrinterShare do the heavy lifting. It will locate available printers on a network, allow for test pages to be printed, and then permit you to send documents or photos to a printer for output. It works and, unlike numerous other printer apps for the Android platform, is clean and not kludgy.

PrintTool For BlackBerry PlayBook

If you search through the BlackBerry App World online market for printing apps, the pickings are as slim as they get: One app is listed.

PrintTool is a minimalistic, straightforward, text-printing app. You’ll need to connect to a network via WiFi, manually enter the IP address of the printer you wish to use, and then cut and paste any plain text into the dialog box for printing. It’s got three major things going for it: It’s free, it works and it’s the only printing app you can find in the BlackBerry App World store.

PrintCentral Pro For iPad

For $8.99 from the Apple iTunes App Store, you can download and install PrintCentral Pro for iPad. It allows for printing documents, images and email from the device to any printer on a network – once you connect to the network via WiFi.

Some configuration is needed to import documents and verify e-mail addresses on the device. It won’t allow you to print directly from an app, like Pages, but rather provides a path to import the data into PrintCentral Pro – which then sends it to the printer.

ImagePrint For Windows Phone 7

Without ImagePrint, the only way to print directly from your Windows Phone 7 device would be to put it face down on a copier and press the green ’print’ button.

A $2.99 download from the Windows Phone 7 Marketplace, ImagePrint does require manual integration of the device with a print server on the network.