A printer for the kind of folk who don’t currently have a printer
For the last month, thanks to the Insiders UK, I’ve been taking a ‘smart’ printer for a spin — The HP Tango. Needless to say the thoughts below are my own.
Let’s go back to the nineties. Computers were getting more powerful. The internet was becoming a mainstream thing. Folk were happy to plonk a big beige tower on a dedicated table and stick a CRT and chunky printer on a sliding shelf. These days? Not so much.
Computing’s gone mobile — laptops, tablets and our phones are the way we consume content. So the PC in the box room is less of a necessity — and by extension, many homes are now bereft of printers — they’ve been usurped by screens.
All this is a problem if you need to print tickets that don’t have an electronic equivalent, have an essay to submit as a paper copy, or want to print photos without a wait for an online service or a traipse to a photo shop. How much of a problem really depends how much you can rely on your work or school’s printers for those ‘odd occasions’ and how easy it might be to find electronic workarounds.
And, of course, It’s also a problem if you want to sell printers and ink.
Enter HP and the Tango — a sleek, app-based ‘smart’ printer, connected to the cloud, offering prints, scans and copies from pretty much any device you can think of. A device they reckon to be ‘beautifully designed’ so as to ‘blend seamlessly into your home décor when not in use’. In other words, it’s not too chunky and when folded up you can add a ‘fashionable’ (Indigo Linen, anyone?) cover so it’s not quite so conspicuous. But you’ll then need to unpack and load some paper when you send it a command to print, whereupon you can marvel at the LED lighting illuminating the paper tray.
It offers decent print quality and it’s as well connected as you’d expect from a modern device. That said, the ability to send remote print jobs isn’t all that helpful if your device is back at home entombed in its swanky cover. As for voice control from Alexa, Cortana or Google Assistant? I’m yet to be convinced that saying what you want is much quicker than a few taps to send an email to print from my phone… others may find this more useful. Scanning to print from your smartphone? Handy, but again, nothing new.
Fundamentally, this is a printer for occasional printing. A device for folk who don’t want to worry about fiddly setup or dried up ink (HP’s instant ink subscription makes for always-available printing). A printer for people who don’t really want a printer and certainly don’t want it eating up valuable real-estate. In those terms, it’s likely to find fans, but there are likely cheaper, less ‘stylish’ options that you can cajole into doing much the same job, albeit with less aplomb. And for many, it’s likely that using the printer at work on occasion is a good enough solution already.
See also: https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/meet-hp-tango-1027562648
