Samsung Mobile Print (for iPad)

I had wanted to test Samsung Mobile Print (for iPad) since I saw the app demonstrated about a year ago, and finally got the chance when we got a Samsung Wi-Fi enabled multifunction printer (MFP) in for review at PC Labs. Despite a few glitches, it's easy to use, and has a good range of printing and scanning options. This free app is a must for anyone with an iPad and a Wi-Fi-enabled Samsung printer or MFP.

Basics
Samsung Mobile Print (for iPad) is available for free through the iTunes app store; the universal app is compatible with both the iPhone and iPad (as well as the iPod touch)—an Android version is also available. It lets you print to any Samsung wireless or network-connected printer or multifunction printer (including USB-connected models) on the same LAN as your iPad, and scan from any Samsung MFP on the network. I tested this app using an iPad 2 and a Samsung CLX-6260FW multifunction printer.

The app will automatically detect Samsung networked printers, but in certain cases (such as if the printer is USB connected), you may have to add it manually, a simple process described in the Help menu.

Once you've selected the printer, you're ready to print or scan. At the top of the screen is a bar with four items: Print, Scan, About, and Help.

Printing
When you touch the Print icon, you enter the printing half of the app, and are presented with six choices: Photo, Camera, Web, Document, Clipboard, and Google Docs.

You can print documents you've saved in your document folder, either ones you've scanned or ones you've imported to your iPad. It prints documents in standard Office, image, and PDF formats. It will print photos at a range of paper sizes, in portrait or landscape orientation, in color or grayscale, in simplex (one-sided) or duplex (two-sided).

Printing from the clipboard is a useful function. You can print text or images copied from Web pages and applications that support copying. You can add bookmarks, but you can't import them. The app did reasonably well in formatting Web pages for printing, though occasionally it would crop off the top of a document. Another glitch is that it would sometimes preview pop-ups (after I'd closed them) rather than the article I was trying to print.

Google Docs is the only cloud-based service directly supported by Samsung MobilePrint. You can print documents shared from some other services such as Dropbox, but you have to first access the document in that service, select Open In and choose Samsung Mobile Print. The app does not list which such services are supported.

In printing, as well as scanning, I occasionally got a Low Memory warning, after which the app would fail to perform the intended function. Sometimes, it was in obviously memory-intensive tasks (like scanning at high resolution), sometimes not. It was unclear whether the memory issues were with the iPad (I tested with an iPad 2), the printing process through the app, or both, though they were more frequent than I'd experienced in testing other similar print apps with my iPad.

Scanning
Using Samsung Mobile Print on the iPad has one big inherent advantage over using it on an iPhone: when you scan to the device, the tablet's screen is large enough for easy and convenient reading.

You can scan either to Documents (a folder solely for scanned documents) or Photos (your photo stream), or to both. In scanning to Documents, you can choose between PDF, PNG, and JPEG; scanning to Photos is JPEG-only.  You can choose color or grayscale; low, normal, or high quality; and sizes including 3.5 by 5, 4 by 6, 5 by 7, letter, legal, and A4; and scanning from the flatbed or ADF.

Scanning was problem free apart from occasional low memory crashes. These occurred most frequently when scan quality was set to high.

Exchanging Files
There are several ways of transferring files from a computer to your iPad and the app: through iTunes, a server, a Web browser, or mapping a network drive. They're described thoroughly in Help. iTunes is dependable, and using a Web browser (by entering your iPad's server URL, which is easy to find through the app) is very easy.

Help
Tapping Help brings up a pull-down menu, divided into seven sections: Samsung MobilePrint, Choosing a device, Printing, Scanning, File Sharing, Customization, and Troubleshooting. Touching any of the items within one of these sections brings up instructions, such as Printing Content from the Clipboard. I found the instructions to be clear and concise. At the bottom of the page are a Home button, which takes you back to the drop-down menu, and right and left arrows to move through Help item by item.

As is the case with free apps from printing manufacturers, Samsung Mobile Print only prints to and scans from its own (Samsung) printers. Still, it does a decent job in comparison with such apps from other manufacturers. It doesn't have native support for the range of cloud-based services that the Editors' Choice provides, though it prints as wide a variety of file formats. lacks integration with cloud-based services. Samsung Mobile Print has a better range of scanning functions than either, though I didn't experience the Samsung app's memory issues (when printing or scanning) with them.

A Worthy Samsung Mobile Print App
Samsung Mobile Print (for iPad) is an easy-to-use app with a variety of printing and scanning options and convenient file transfer between your computer and the app. Printing and scanning were occasionally hobbled by memory issues, the Web browser experience could be improved, and better integration with cloud-based services would be helpful. (You can only directly print from within the app from Google Docs.) It's not quite up to joining (the Epson-only) Epson iPrint 2.0 as a mobile printing app Editor's Choice, but for Samsung Wi-Fi printer owners with an iPad, this free app is a boon to mobile printing and a must to download.

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