News

But suppose they want a receipt?

We're supposed to leave our notebook PCs behind, and live with our PDAs, even for doing corporate presentations, apparently; but one perennial problem confronts the true mobile pioneer: paper. Enter Brother with "the world's smallest printer"

The m-PRNT takes A7 sized sheets of paper; about the size of a screen of the standard pocket PC. It talks to a standard Pocket PC via infra-red and runs off a battery good enough to produce 100 sheets of black-and-white printout.

On the face of it, a silly notion; reviewers pointed out that the price of the special thermal paper is not low (£2.50 for a cartridge which might have around 100 tiny sheets) that the printer itself is just a tad wide and long for most real-world pockets, and that anyway, the point of a wirelessly-connected PDA is that you don't have to have paper! You have the whole Web in your pocket!

Well, yes; but you can't give someone a copy. This lets you not only look up a map of where you are going, but give one to the taxi driver. It lets you find a restaurant on your GPRS-enabled PDA, and it lets you show the menu to your colleagues without having to give them your PDA to play with.

We fell in love with it at NewsWireless when they showed us the carbon paper. Yes, one of the cartridges prints out two sheets at a time; but even better, if you sign the top one, you get the signature through to the bottom one. So you can print out a receipt there and then, and get your client to sign it.

Well worth the £250.oo including VAT, for those who ever find themselves in this position. Stockists can be found by phoning 0870 544 3010 and no doubt, one day, they'll get around to putting details up on the Web site too.