Samsung Mobile Print (for iPhone) Review

Samsung Mobile Print (for iPhone) offers a decent feature set for a mobile printing app, and it's worth downloading by owners of Wi-Fi enabled Samsung printers and multi-function printers (MFPs) who want to print from or scan to their iPhone. It works better with the latest iPhones, but any Samsung owner can benefit from it.

Basics
Samsung Mobile Print (for iPhone) is available for free through the iTunes app store; the same app is good for both the iPhone and iPad—Samsung MobilePrint for Android version is also available. Samsung Mobile Print lets you print to any Samsung wireless or network-connected printer or multifunction printer (MFP) (including USB-connected models) on the same LAN as your iPhone, and scan from any Samsung MFP on the network. I tested this app using a Samsung CLX-6260FW multifunction printer (MFP) and both an iPhone 4 and iPhone 5.

The app automatically detects Samsung networked printers, but in certain cases (such as if the printer is USB connected), you may have to add it manually, a straightforward process described in the Help menu. Once you've selected the printer, you're ready to go.

At the top of the screen is a bar with four items: Print, Scan, About, and Help, with Print and Scan being the app's main divisions.

Printing
When you touch the Print icon, you enter the printing half of the app, and are presented with six sources: 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 iPhone. Samsung Mobile Print prints documents in standard Office, image, and PDF formats, at a range of paper sizes and thicknesses, in portrait or landscape orientation, in color or grayscale, in simplex (one-sided) or duplex (two-sided) modes. It has a similar range of settings for printing photos. I noticed a couple of issues. Some photos printed with a slight greenish tinge, which was absent when I printed these images to the same printer by other methods. There were occasional misformats; for example, a PowerPoint presentation with line breaks in the middle of words.

Printing from the clipboard is a useful function. You can print text or images copied from Web pages and applications that support copying. Using the Web browser, 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 the top or side of a document. Also, it would sometimes preview pop-ups (after I'd closed them) instead of the the article I was trying to print.

Google Docs is the only cloud-based service directly supported (with a dedicated button) by Samsung Mobile Print. You can print documents shared from some other services such as Dropbox, but you have to either first access the document in that service, select Open In and choose Samsung Mobile Print, or else open the cloud service's URL in Web mode.

In printing, as well as in scanning with my iPhone 4, 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. Worse, the app would occasionally freeze. Closing and reopening the app didn't help; I'd have to turn my phone on and off to unfreeze it. I didn't encounter these issues after I upgraded to the iPhone 5 in the middle of testing.

Scanning
Scanning with Samsung Mobile Print on the iPhone is less useful than with the iPad, simply because the screen—even on the iPhone 5—is much smaller and so it's harder to read and view scanned documents.  That said, you can always offload the scanned images to your PC, or email them elsewhere, when you have a chance.

You can scan either to Documents (a folder solely for scanned documents) or Photos (your photo stream). 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, by and large, was easy, and it generally worked as billed. One issue I encountered a couple of times is that Samsung Mobile Print would not detect the scanner, even though it had no problem recognizing the printer, even though they're parts of the same MFP. Most of the time, though, the app would both print and scan.

Exchanging Files
There are several ways of transferring files from a computer to your iPhone 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 iPhone's server URL) is fairly easy.

Help
Tapping on Help brings up a pull-down menu, divided into seven sections: Samsung Mobile Print; Choosing a device; Printing; Scanning; File Sharing; Customization; and Troubleshooting. Touching any of the items within one of these sections brings up instructions, for example, for 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.

Conclusion
Samsung Mobile Print (for iPhone) is a worthy app for those who need to print to Samsung printers or scan from Samsung MFPs. Your experience will be better with a recent model iPhone, as I experienced memory issues and crashes with the iPhone 4, but, even with the older model, it is well worth downloading if you have a compatible printer.

More iPhone App Reviews:

• Adblock Plus (for iPhone)
• CloudMagic (for iPhone)
• Ridiculous Fishing - A Tale of Redemption (for iPhone)
• AVG PrivacyFix (for iPhone)
• Adobe Photoshop Touch (for iPhone)
• more