Daily App: OKI Mobile Print Delivers Unusual Features

OKI Data Mobile Print for Android is one of the more capable mobile printing apps we've seen, giving OKI resellers an important edge. Not only can it print files directly from Android's root file system, but also from image galleries and online storage with thumbnail previews. What's more, OKI's app can capture and print images using device cameras, performs some basic image editing and displays status of print jobs and consumables, which allows solution provider techs to peek in on issues remotely.

Mobile Print works with most of the company's single- and multifunction printers. We tested it with the OKI MC562w color MFP we reviewed last year, and the OKI B512DN monochromatic LED-based SFP we'll be covering next week.

Like most apps of this kind, OKI Mobile Print works only on a LAN, and scans for compatible OKI devices as its first order of business. When a device is found, the scanning screen displayed toggles for color and duplex features of the tested unit. When multiple devices are listed, the desired printer is selected using a radio button. Devices can be renamed or deleted by long-pressing. There's no "Back" button from here; the app instead relies on Android's back function to return to the main UI. This presents four large buttons for selecting print sources: Web, Picture, File and Camera, plus another marked Settings that returns to the device discovery screen and a list of current print jobs, if any.

[Related: Daily App: Brother iPrint And Scan Does Both Capably ]

To print from a web page, OKI's app launches an embedded browser, in which the desired page can be brought up by searching or entering a URL directly. If the device's browser is preferred, simply use that browser to bring up the page and share it with OKI Mobile Print using the browser menu; an image of the page is handed to the embedded browser for printing, which presents navigation buttons for multipage output.

For editing an image on the device or that's captured with the camera, Mobile Print calls on the OpenCV Manager open-source libraries, or offers to install it. OpenCV adds the ability switch to grayscale and black-and-white modes, to adjust contrast and saturation, and to crop and adjust the image perspective. It doesn't exactly rotate the image, which we would have liked, but it creates some interesting effects. OKI Mobile Print is a capable app for capturing and printing images and documents to OKI printers from Android devices. For those running iOS, the company relies solely on Apple AirPrint.

PUBLISHED JAN. 27, 2015