Daily App: Samsung Mobile Print Also Does The Buying

Samsung printer VARs can recommend with confidence the company's mobile printing apps; they're among the best-looking and most stable that we've seen, and they present a list of authorized VARs as sources for printer accessories and consumables. And when issues arise, Samsung's apps can help IT support staff gain insight into what might be causing a printer problem.

Samsung Mobile Print for Android and for iOS presents a simple, clean and logical interface with tabs for printing, faxing and scanning, and icons for selecting files from browser, camera, email and gallery apps. Files can come from Box, Dropbox, Evernote, Facebook, Google Drive and Microsoft OneDrive. When first launched, the app offers to enable NFC on the device (if it's not already) in support of the tap-to-print feature.

Selecting no printer by default, the app when prompted found and offered to connect to the Samsung ProXpress C2620DW via Wi-Fi or Wi-Fi Direct. We chose the former and connected seamlessly to Dropbox to print some test pages.

[Related: Review: Samsung 850 EVO SSD Stacked For Speed ]

Before printing, Mobile Print brings up a zoomable preview of the first page of a document, and displays others as selected thumbnails in a row along the bottom of the screen. The app allows image files to be rotated, cropped and cloned. Thumbnailed pages can be deselected simply by tapping on the large checkmark. Tapping on boxes in the upper-left-hand corner presents drop-downs for changing paper size, number of copies and print layout. The usual array of advanced output controls pop up by tapping a gear icon.

When trouble arises, the app can be used to quickly connect to the printer in question and bring up printer settings, supply levels and other information of interest. The app also can print reports of the printer's configuration settings, usage, supply info, network configuration and help files. It also can be configured to send an alert when toner runs below a configurable threshold; the default is 10 percent.

Controls are logical and neatly arranged. The stable app was responsive at all times. VARs selling Samsung printers have a solid set of mobile apps to offer customers and to use themselves to enhance their own services.

PUBLISHED FEB. 6, 2015