A Call for a Universal Mobile Print Solution
One could say that the selection of mobileprint apps on the market today is almost as diverse as the number of tablet and smartphone platforms they are made for. There is at least onemobile print app from just about every major printer maker, in addition to those offered by software companies. Each app covers a limited numberof printers and offers its own level of print functionality. Despite nearly a decade of growth in the smartphone market and two years since thefirst iPad, there still isn’t a universal solution that allows users to print whatever they want, from any program, to any printer. Andthis lack of a universal solution is preventing print vendors from connecting to the massive amount of content circulating on mobile devices.
To understand the importance of developing an easy-to-use and universally applicable mobile print solution it is important to understand thechanging relationship between printers and the PCs that they connect to. The printer industry has and always will be dependent on the devicesthat create and distribute printable content, which for many years was the desktop PC. Around 2006, notebooks surpassed desktops in US consumerPC shipments, and it was about that same time that US inkjet sales began to stall.
This change in PC preference led to a change in the way users consumed content, and ultimately broke down thelongstanding correlation between PC and printer purchases. Historically, retailers relied heavily on this relationship between PC and printerpurchases, and frequently offered incentives encouraging customers to purchase the two together. Since mid-2010, gap intelligence has watchedretailers all but abandon the idea that customers are going to buy a printer every time they purchase a PC.
The notebookPC’s rise to prominence was followed soon after by an explosion in smartphone shipments and the introduction of the Apple iPad in 2010. Incontrast to notebook PCs that run Windows or OS X and therefore have the same familiar print functionality as desktops, smartphones and tablets usenew mobile operating systems that often lack the familiar ‘print’ button that is common on traditional PCs.
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