Shouldn’t you be able to use your phone as you do your computer? So why not print from it?  Connectivity technology has now caught up with the possibilities for mobile printing and in this post Masao Sekine, K3’s Senior Software Engineer, explains why K3 decided to focus on mobile printing for the Symbian platform.

Followers of the blog will remember K3 from the lively discussion which resulted from their post on the opportunities for the Symbian community in this new era of open source development. This was quickly followed with a Major Contribution Proposal from K3 to rework Symbian’s mobile printing framework. Here’s Masao Sekine…

K3 have long and proud history with the Symbian OS, and have been working on it since the EPOC days and in that time we see that Symbian has been changed a lot.  In particular, development has changed from a proprietary base to community base.  We very much welcome this change and see this as an important opportunity for both technology development and business.

As a first step to determine a contribution to this community, we decided to focus on a new printing framework in order to improve flexibility and extensibility… But before we go into go in the detail of this contribution, we will say something on our motivation to do this of the development.

It’s time to print….
Reflecting back on the history of printing from a cellar phone.. well, there has never been much usage.  Why is this? We determined that the reason might be the technology.  Take wild guess: when you print something from PC, how much data do you send to the printer device?  It is must be anything from few mega bytes to perhaps more than fifty mega bytes in particular cases.

Added to this, there has not been an efficient transport mechanism as part of the phone with sufficient capacity to transport such huge amounts of data.  The technology to allow printing has not matured.

Nowadays, we have very capable “smart phones” with Wireless LAN and 3G wireless networks will manage the transfer of hundred megabytes data within a few seconds.  In the near future, much faster networks like LTE with low cast.  So printing starts to become more feasible as the technology begins to catch up to meet the demand for mobile print applications. We believe the time for printing has come!

Anyway, anyhow, anywhere.
We began our work by roughly defining the main characteristics of mobile phone usage.  The first we believed is that a user can call in any situation for convenience: “anyway”.  We identified a second by suggesting a user can call by any model of mobile phone: “anyhow”. And finally a user can call from “anywhere”.  Now assuming that there will be a need to print from mobile phones, the development activity would need to emulate these crucial characteristics. The user should be able to print at any convenience, using any mobile phone, and from any location. The existing Symbian framework lacked this capability, even though the technology is there to make it possible.

Direct mobile printing is now available.
Since mobile phone technology has now advanced, we believe the mobile market needs the capability to print however we still see a gap between what the technology can offer and what the market will do with it.  Our motivation in presenting this new framework to Symbian is to provide the basis to allow these 2 to combine: the new printing framework works as a glue to bind the capabilities of the technology and the needs of the market.

The printing framework have four important functionalities:

1) Extensibility of Printer Properties
The framework carries basic print device properties to allow the user to easily configure a printer device. The framework also allows developers to extend these properties to manage unique print features.

2) Extensibility Search Printer Device
The new framework will allow the device to search for available printers residing on a network so long as the right plug-in to provided to the framework. Print device vendors can provide this plugin and easily include it within the framework.

3) Extensibility of output printer data
To enhance the print process, the new Symbian framework provides the mechanism to easily switch between different print drivers. This means that user is able to not only print image data, but also any kind of screen data, very easily.

4) Extensibility of bearer selection
Finally, allowing the user to choose the output capability or bearer. For example sending printing data over Wireless LAN, 3G communication, or Bluetooth

Chicken or egg?
When a new technology is introduced i.e. “the egg”, the question becomes “how will it hatch to become a good business i.e. the chicken?” because the chicken always comes afterwards. In this case with our mobile printing technology, we consider that the technology, “the egg” must come first.. but we do not have the answer to how it will hatch. Our solution is a contribution to Symbian which the community will soon be able to access freely. Please try it and we will hatch the egg together!