Google News Updates

After the need of Flash support and the “missing” camera, one of the biggest complaints about the iPad is that you can’t print from it, with or without a wire. Google is about to solve this difficulty with cloud-printing, which will send your documents from a mobile device to any web-connected printer.

I tend to view printing as something like the floppy disk, a legacy technology that nobody actually needs anymore. And before you light up the remarks telling me you need to print receipts for your car repair shop customers, I say that’s not the job of an iPad or a cellphone. What you want is a computer. For the odd boarding pass or file I might need on paper, I just email the file to the print shop down the road and pay them 10 cents.

But if you still maintain on dead tree copies, Google hears you. To allow printing from its driver-free Chrome OS and any other mobile device, Google is putting those drivers in the cloud. Apps send produce jobs to Google Cloud Print, whereupon they are processed and sent to net-connected printers. And this isn’t just the printer in your upstairs office, either. It could be on the new side of the world.

Google has today released the code and documents to developers, so its just a matter to come for this to show up in the apps you use. In the meantime, iPad users might like this alternative solution.