Gadgetory

ever since the advent of the modern personal computer the promise of a paperless office has been omnipresent today that promise hasn't been fully realized even with tablets that are excellent reading devices we still have times when we need to get that information from the screen and put it onto paper till recently that hasn't been very easy I'm Joel Levi for pocket now let's go hands-on with printing support one of the lesser-known features that comes with Android 4.4 KitKat this is my Nexus 5 but what I'm about to show you will work on any device that is running Android version 4.4 or above see one of the new features with KitKat is a plug-in architecture the one we're going to show you today is the printing infrastructure and that lets you set up various printing services the one that comes kind of default and stock with pretty much every version of Android is Google's own cloud print which lets you use their cloud printing service to print to any printers that you've got set up there today I'm going to show you a different one it's the HP print service plug-in but any other print manufacturer that has a plug-in in the Play Store or work just fine and it'll show up in here so what I've done before this video is I went out to the Play Store and I download it and install the HP print service plugin and that's pretty much all I had to do once that's installed then we come over here and turn it on do we want to use this our document may pass through one or more servers on its way to our printer now the reason for that is this device is connected to a wireless network my printer is connected to another network or possibly the same network but for the processing it may go all the way out to HP and back in so we'll go ahead and say ok to that right now it's searching my local Wi-Fi network for printers and it should find the printer that I have sitting just behind me if it takes a little bit longer than you think it should to find your printer make sure your printer is turned on and that it hasn't gone into its sleep mode which mine had once I turned that back on everything was fine it detected the printer really fast and I'm good to go you can see here it's using the print service plug-in that we just downloaded and installed previously so that's good if you want to turn this off you can just by toggling that if you did not find your printer you can add it over here by IP address or by name so that's nice but ours is all set up so we don't need to worry about that what I do want to show you is the settings because this is kind of robust and that's why I like using this plug-in over some of the others out there let's go ahead and go into settings you can change the protocol if you want to change for the default to the EP CL protocol this is not the default setting but you can I don't have any reason to do it so I've just left that off my printer has a duplexer so I can print to both sides of the page I like that it saves me on paper so you know save a tree or just be cheap and don't buy as much paper whatever I don't care but I can do that very simply and I can toggle that on and off I want there's nothing worse than having just really really block G print jobs come out so this will show me a notification when they inked in the cartridges is low if I want to I can share the data of my usage with HP services I've opted not to do that because that's just extra data that is flying across what I'm already paying for so not getting anything extra from it from HP so I've just chosen not to of course I've got the obligatory application versions and the legal stuff but that's pretty much it now all we have to do is find something to print and print it that's where android kitkat really excels as opposed to some of the other apps for example what I had before was at the HP ePrint ER selection if I can come back in here you can use ePrint and it does essentially the same thing but everything you print has to be done through the app this app rather than the app that you're trying to print from let me show you what I mean I fired up quick office and I've created a new document let's go ahead and open that up again it's going to open it from my we'll drive says hello world let's go ahead and change that too hello pocketnow complete with spelling mistakes and all so that's good let's go ahead and save that change just go ahead and save it in place there we go we're all done if this were the old HP printing app or if you're trying to print from a non KitKat device you're going to have to exit this app open the HP app open this in that app and then print very clutchy here we simply go up to our menu hit print it brings up our print dialog which we can now change what printer we want to save it to or send it to rather our printer or save it as a PDF or look at an all printers list so very nice there especially with PDF integration we want to send it there so we'll leave that we only want one copy but we could select more if we wanted to we can print this in color or in black and white this is just black and white so I'm going to select that orientation we can change and the paper size which letter is what we want now all I have to do is hit print and if you can hear over my shoulder that document is coming out right now so that's how you set up wireless printing from your android-powered device again remember this is just with Android 4.4 KitKat anything below that and your options are relatively proprietary and not nearly as smooth and is integrated into the operating system as they are with the latest version of Android if you liked what you saw here and want to see more tips like these go ahead and give the video a thumbs up and make sure you subscribe to our channel so you don't miss out on those when we do release them we're also on your favorite social media networks you can tell your friends all about us there over on Twitter we're at pocket now and I'm at Joe Levi thank you very much for watching and we'll catch you next time I'm Joe Levi for pocket now and if I had people not making noises outside my door that would have been a good take you