HP ePrint Home & Biz v. 4.1 (for iPhone)

HP pulled off a coup in late 2010 when some of its printers became the sole beneficiaries of Apple’s printing feature for iPhones, iPads, and iPods. HP’s own mobile printing app, ePrint, has evolved (replacing the old ePrint Photo) to provide a better alternative in some situations than printing with AirPrint. However, some of its functions still have kinks that need to be worked out.

HP ePrint Home and Biz v. 4.1 (for iPhone) lets users print photos saved on your i-thing as well as ones shot from within the app; print other document types (as well as transfer documents from your computer to your i-device for printing, either wirelessly or over your iPhone’s cable), Web pages, images, and initiate scans. It also lets you print email attachments received in your iPhone’s email client.

All recent HP wireless printers support HP ePrint Home & Biz 4.1; a full list is available on HP’s Web site. Among the file types it supports printing from are JPEGs, PDFs, TXT, and the Microsoft Office suite.  The app also works on iPhones and iPods touch (and there’s an Android version as well); I tested it with an iPhone 4 and an HP Envy 110 printer.

After I downloaded HP ePrint Home & Biz v. 4.1 (for iPhone) and opened it, it had no trouble locating the HP printer on my network, though I had to register my phone with HP’s ePrintCenter before it could print certain items (like Web pages and Office documents). This is done by entering an e-mail address to which HP sends a confirmation with a validation code.

Interface

Once you’ve registered your iPhone, when you open HP ePrint Home & Biz, you’ll see a menu containing several choices: Photo Albums; Saved Files; Web Browser; Camera; and Scanner, each with a corresponding icon. At the bottom of the screen are two other choices: ePrint Job Status, and Settings. If your HP printer is ePrint compatible (and most recent HP printers are), registering it with HP’s ePrintCenter will get the printer its own email address to which you can send print jobs for it to print out—even if you’re halfway around the world. (It’s a little confusing, registering both mobile device and printer with HP’s ePrintCenter, but both add entirely different printing functionalities, and registering the iPhone unlocks some of the app’s most important features.)

Tapping on Photo Albums displays all your iPhone’s photo albums. Touching a photo brings up a print preview. You can select paper size, image size, paper type (plain or photo paper), and paper source (main or automatic—usually photo—tray). Depending on the dimensions and orientation of the photo, printed image size may max out at 4 by 6 or go up to 5 by 7 or “custom size”. Print settings are quite limited compared with some mobile printer apps we’ve seen such as (which, granted, only works with Epson printers). Print quality is good, but on several occasions I’d get an error message that there appeared to be an unidentified print problem—even when the WiFi connection seemed to be strong.

Clicking on Web Browser opens the app’s own Web browser. You can save bookmarks, but you can’t import them. Once you’ve called up a page, clicking on Print Preview formats the page for printing. Watch out, though, it will occasionally mangle text; for example, the dates of blog entries in several CNN blogs were indecipherable—as they were when I printed out the pages from the app.

Direct from the Camera

You can print out photos directly from your camera by clicking the main menu’s Camera item. Once you snap, it gives you the option to retake or use. If you choose the latter, you’ll see a print preview from which you can print.

Clicking on Scan lets you initiate a scan from your phone. When you preview the scan, you can crop the image as you like before scanning. You can save the scan as an image or document.

You can also print email attachments from your iPhone’s email client.  Once you’ve opened the email, tapping on the attachment will bring up a list of programs you can open it in. Clicking on HP ePrint Home & Biz will preview the document for printing.

One feature the app lacks is the ability to print from or save to cloud-based services such as EverNote and Google Docs. Several other mobile apps for other brands of printers, such as Epson iPrint, have incorporated this.

Anybody with a recent HP wireless printer should give this free app a try. It offers versatility in print settings that AirPrint lacks, and it’s a big step forward from the old images-only ePrint Photo. It’s the best choice for HP printer owners, but has some problems like the wonky Web browser, and it falls well short of the best mobile printing apps we’ve seen.

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