HP + Palm: Will it shake up the printer industry?
May 25, 2010 by Steve HannafordPosted in: Dealers & Channel, In this week's e-newsletter, New Products
Hewlett-Packard’s purchase of portable device maker Palm will give the company an operating system (WebOS) for tablet computers to compete with Apple’s iPad. But it may also have a big impact on HP’s printer line.
The company has announced that it would start rolling out WebOS-equipped printers by the end of the year.
An operating system on a printer? What for?
As more and more computing migrates from desktop computers to laptops, smartphones, and now tablets, there is a growing need for printers and printer multifunctionals that can interact intelligently with such devices.
The traditional method for printing up until now is to have, resident on a network-attached PC, elaborate print formatting tools in applications like Word or Excel along with complex drivers with a wide range of options. For each printer on the network, you probably have a separate driver, and you have to periodically update them. HP has made some progress in providing a universal driver for its products, but that doesn’t help when you encounter a Xerox or a Brother machine on the road.
Mobile devices are far less likely to have drivers for the multiple Wi-Fi and Bluetooth enabled printers they encounter out of the office. The tedious task of downloading and installing the right driver takes away most of the advantage of being mobile. Plus, as we have seen with smartphones and the iPad, traditional print drivers don’t make much sense.
Mobile devices, moreover, are less likely to need to print from applications with sophisticated built-in print functions, like the Microsoft Office programs. Mobile users are increasingly likely to be printing photos, web pages, e-mails with attachments, PDF files, text notes and other miscellaneous documents, so putting the smarts in the printer, rather than the mobile device, makes more sense.
The addition of an operating system with developed, targeted apps on the printer mean that the mobile device’s main job can be simply sending the file to the printer. The formatting choices and print attributes can be handled by the printer through a set of smart applications and previews on a built-in display screen.
The idea is that HP will roll out a set of printers that don’t necessarily need to be connected via Ethernet or USB. The software will, of course, be even more useful on multifunctionals, where such services as fax over Internet and distribute-and-print will be natural products.
The details are still sketchy, but this approach looks like it may be a game-changer in the printer industry, forcing all printers and multifunctionals to get smarter.
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Tags: Hewlett-Packard, HP, Palm, WebOS
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May 26th, 2010 at 9:18 am
HP makes really good calculators and desktops, but they don’t know HOW to make a good printer these days.
There are two really big problems with HP printers:
1. Quality: All the new HP printers are basically disposable from a quality standpoint. Cheap, thin plastic parts, print heads wear out quickly, vinyl gears are all designed to “throw away” every six months to a year.
2. IMMENSELY bad software: Drivers are the epitome of “bloatware”, taking HUNDREDS OF MEGABYTES to install, with a running memory footprint of 50 to 100 meg of RAM! That’s the size of a small operating system! In the IT service industry, we joke that you have to install the “HP Operating System” to print to an HP printer….. that’s not far from the truth. The drivers typically do not function right out of the box without an update (if you can find one), and some devices such as multifunction devices have drivers that, in an attempt to reinvent plug-and-play, reinstall themselves every time you PLUG IN the device or power it on. HP should stay way away from software and leave that to the professionals.
When HP last made a handheld, running Windows CE, it was called the “Jornada”. The Jornada was a well-constructed device, very rugged, and quite well implemented. I’m hoping that they move in the “Jornada” direction with Palm, and not the HP Printer direction.
HP has a history of improving product quality through acquisition, namely the acquisition of Compaq, so I’m hoping that this is a bonus for future HP as well as future Palm users.
Now….. if they could just purchase Canon to replace their printer line…..
May 26th, 2010 at 10:57 am
This would make me stop buying HP printers completely. Right now they are the hardest printers in my fleet to manage. I end up having to go into msconfig to stop the software from taking up all the resources when the computer starts, you don’t get any options on whether you want the bloatware or just the drivers, and with the last one we purchased it tries to reinstall itself everytime it turns on. It’s also really slow to load up when you select to print to it. I’ll be looking at other manufacturers for my printer needs if this is the way HP is going to go. My users and I don’t need to go to the printer and determine format. Let us do that in the software we are printing from, what I do need is a printer that prints out what’s on the screen with minimal fuss and overhead.
May 26th, 2010 at 2:50 pm
Did you ever hear of Ricoh’s Hotspot printer? They already have a product that will do this!
June 1st, 2010 at 12:16 pm
As the IT guy for many companies, and as an HP ASP, I know to never use the installation disk autorun to install any printer. I only install the drivers and never have a problem. There is nothing wrong with the drivers, it’s all the other unneeded junk that the install disks load.
I agree the quality on the low end printers has gone way way down, even on the what used to be considered the smaller workgroup printers. The upper end of the line are still the work horse’s that we expect them to be.
Ricoh’s hotspot printer works well, but like everything else has it’s limitations. You have to either email it, or be able to get on a website to print.