Few options open for turning images into palpable prints

You are taking loads of cool pictures using your mobile phone camera and you want to make prints of your favourites. What can you do?

The fast answer is to find yourself a Kodak Picture Maker kiosk. Kodak has created photo kiosks where Nokia 7650 and 3650 camera phone users can stop by, upload their images and pick up their prints, stickers or calendars with very little waiting time. But these picture kiosks are still hard to come by in Hong Kong.

The catch, however, is that it does not work with just any mobile phone and any HP printer. The Phone2Print software works only with the Nokia 3650 and the HP Deskjet 450 using a Bluetooth wireless connection.

The good news is that HP is developing the software to work with any Bluetooth-enabled mobile phone on the Nokia Series 60 platform, which is built on the Symbian operating system. HP has indicated that support for the printer software soon will include the Nokia 7650 and 6600, though it has not given a time frame.

The HP Deskjet 450, launched early this year, is a portable colour inkjet printer made for printing from portable devices such as digital cameras, personal digital assistants and laptop computers.

You can connect to it wirelessly via Bluetooth or Infrared. It prints from A4-size business documents down to small photo stickers. HP claims that the colour inkjet cartridges for the Deskjet 450 are particularly efficient and can print up to 400 pages before needing to be replaced.