PrintCentral for iPhone Review
Price: $7.99
Version Reviewed: 1.7.2
Device Reviewed On: iPad
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PrintCentral allows you to print almost any document from a wide variety of sources - chief among these your email, iDisk, WebDAV server, Dropbox, Box.net and Google Docs accounts. Simply enter your account information and PrintCentral will show you the files. Click the check box next to the file you want, and PrintCentral will download it to your iPhone so you can print it directly. Provided you have a WiFi connection to your wireless printer, you should be able to print the file immediately.
And print it did - in relatively quick fashion. I used my home wireless Canon Pixma MP560, and PrintCentral found the printer and printed to it effortlessly. A few caveats, though: the print quality was okay and nothing spectacular (expect fonts to be a bit jaggy and/or fuzzy) and my printer wanted to print the document more than once. When I cancelled the process, my printer stalled and is, even as a I write this, completely locked on a "Printing from PC" screen. Clearly, printing from iOS devices is still not an exact science.
PrintCentral also offers several additional features that make it worth the $7.99 price. Chief among these is the ability to turn your iPhone into a WiFi hard drive for your PC, and (if someone else has the PrintCentral app installed on his/her phone) the ability to copy and transfer files between iPhones. These are useful bonuses, but it's the core functionality of PrintCentral that will get users most interested, at least until Apple issues a better handling of printing in iOS.