Daily App: Brother iPrint & Scan Does Both Capably

To complement its versatile line of printers, Brother offers a series of apps for printing and scanning from more mobile devices than most competitors, and provides tools to help solution providers build printing capabilities into their own apps. We tested iPrint&Scan for Android; the company also offers versions for iOS and for Windows Phone. The functionality also is available as Cortado Workplace for BlackBerry.

On first launch, the app scans the local network and lists all compatible Brother devices. After a moment it found our test printer, a Brother MFC J5620 color inkjet multifunction printer. Our first test was a letter-sized color 1,200-dpi scan, which appeared on the device after about 20 seconds. Options at this point are crop, share and save, with JPG and PDF file formats as the only choices. Documents are saved in the device gallery or can be attached directly to Gmail messages. The app also supports walk-up printing via NFC and Web-based printing if the printer is set up with Google Cloud Print.

The app also can be used to print gallery images, email messages, Web pages or documents stored locally or in Drive, Dropbox, Evernote and OneDrive. When linked with a cloud-based account, iPrint displaying file metadata and downloads selected documents to be previewed and printed and deletes them when finished. Options for printing include selection of paper size, number of copies, color/monochrome, print quality (normal or fine) and a toggle for two-sided printing.

Brother's iPrint&Scan is a sturdy app that delivers an adequate, if minimal, set of features for working with supported Brother laser and inkjet MFPs. Brother also offers a Print SDK for Android Demo as an aid to developers and solution providers incorporating printing into their own apps.

PUBLISHED JAN. 27, 2015