Brother announced a new all-in-one printer called Business Smart...

Brother announced a new all-in-one printer called Business Smart with faster print speeds, a smaller footprint and mobile device compatibility that enables users to print and post images from smartphones and tablets. Brother is touting mobile device printing capabilities on the new all-in-ones, Joyce Santos, director of product planning, told us, as a hedge against a falloff in home printing in general. HP has cited a slowdown in home printing in its past several earnings reports, and Santos acknowledged that home printing has generally been flat for Brother, but she said there’s been an uptick in consumers printing from mobile devices. The Business Smart printers come with Apple’s AirPrint “driverless” technology that enables consumers to print photos from an iPhone or iPad, she said, and Brother will release at the end of the month an updated version of its iPrint & Scan app that adds Microsoft Office document printing to a palette that includes photos, PDFs, and Web pages, Santos said. Brother doesn’t have data on how many consumers are printing from mobile devices but customer questions to product managers have shown a strong interest in the feature, she said. The Business Smart printer offers mobile compatibility via Wi-Fi Direct and Wi-Fi 802.11 versions b, g and n, Santos said, and users who want to print over the Internet can do so via a Gmail account and Google Cloud Print. The touchscreen interface has a swipe feature to mimic operations of smartphones, she said. The printer, designed for the small and home office market, outputs up to 11 x 17 prints from a footprint measuring just over that size owing to new paper loading technology that switches paper orientation from portrait to landscape, Santos said, adding that the footprint of the printer is 35 percent smaller than other all-in-one models (with print, scan, fax and copy functions) currently on the market. A new ink cartridge design with thinner walls holds more ink for better print cost per page, she said. Color printing is 7.6 cents per page and monochrome is 2.3 cents per page, she said, and the printer will list for $199 when it ships to office superstores and Best Buy in October. Printing speed was boosted to 20 pages per minute black and 18 ppm color, compared with 12 ppm and 10 ppm in the previous generation, she said.