Printing Stuff from an Android Phone with PrinterShare

I am always on the quest to find nice applications for my Android. There are many not so good applications on Android Market. Many applications are fun for a couple of minutes, but not so useful. Today I found one that I liked. I do not know if I am going to use it a lot, but the concept is simple and yet powerful. I am talking about the PrinterShare application.

The PrinterShare application is used for printing from your Android application. You could print pictures, web pages, contacts, messages, e-mail etc. The PrinterShare is also added to the share menu. You have two ways of printing your stuff; either using a nearby printer or a remote printer. A nearby printer is found using a Wifi access point. To use a remote printer you need to install an application on your computer and register yourself at the PrinterShare site. Let us see when I tried out the PrinterShare application.

Finding a nearby printer was very easy. My printer is connected to my Synology DS110j, which has support for the Bonjour protocol. Since the PrinterShare application also has support for Bonjour they found each other without any problems. But I was a little bit disappointed when I only could print a test page. To print using a nearby printer you need to buy the pro version of the PrinterShare application. The real bad thing here is that paid applications are not available here in Sweden. But luckily enough it seems to be possible to buy a key using PayPal. The price is a modest $4.95.

 Finding my nearby printer.

Since I was curious to try the application out, I registered myself at the site. The registration was simple.  I entered my e-mail address, in return I got an e-mail with an auto generated user id and password. A couple of minutes later I had managed to print a picture that I found in my phone. Nice and easy.

Beside the setback with using the local printer solution, I was impressed how simple it was to get everything to work. It is applications like this that is nice to have installed on your Android phone. I am not sure if this is an application that I am going to use very often, but it is rather cool. If I am going to use it extensively, I think it would be worth paying $4.95.

What is your favorite Android application? Is there any Android application that you could not live without?

Back at Home :)

I am finally back from my vacation. Last week I was in Egypt with my family. They had an Internet café in the reception of the hotel, but it did only work one time when I was there. But I guess it was a good thing to be offline for some time. At least my family appreciated it. Prior to that I was in Istanbul. Turkey. This was a trip together with my colleges. I learned a lot of new things about the Android platform. The most interesting thing was to try out Robotium, a testing framework for Android. It is built around the existing testing framework found in Android, but it is much simpler. If you want to know more, please read this excellent article.

That is all for now. Nice to be back at home with a working Internet connection.