With the release of AirPrint late last year, Apple finally gave iDevice users what they’d been clamoring for (and quite loudly, since the iPad’s debut): the easy ability to print from a wifi connected printer. Hurrah! Problem is, it only works with printers made by HP — owners of Epsons, Canons and the rest were left out in the cold.
However, for Epson owners willing to shell out $10, Thinxtream‘s PrintJinni app already provided a means to print to select Epson wifi-connected printers. In late December PrintJinni became a free download to put itself on even footing with AirPrint, pricewise — question is, how good of a solution is it?
Well, not bad. Arguably the most important question — if the app works as promised — is answered: it does. Setting up the app took a few minutes but was pretty simple and straightforward; after that, finding local wifi-networked printers was super-easy and printing Word documents and PDFs worked flawlessly on our Artisan 710 test printer. But Epson users should only be celebrating half-heartedly — PrintJinni is really a stopgap measure, and the list of caveats is long:
Because the app’s service works via your email account, it can only print email attachments, which means printing directly from files stored on the iPhone — like, say, photos from the iPhone’s photo album — isn’t possible (although once an email attachment is opened, it can be saved to the iDevice within the app for later viewing or printing); the list of printable file types is small — only print JPGs, PDFs and Office 2003/2007 docs; not all Epson models aren’t supported (although most higher-end models from about the last year or two are); the service can only access IMAP mail accounts.
Finally, though the app is free for now and includes a year’s worth of service fee, in theory users might have to pay for the service after the year expires — although the chances that AirPrint or something similar won’t be around for Epsons is by that time is slim.
PrintJinni isn’t a perfect solution, but it gives Epson printers a much-needed ability to print from iOS devices and it’s free. For now, we’ll take that and run, and hope a better solution is on the way.
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