HP Officejet 100 Mobile review

With inkjet printers far outselling other forms of colour print, they’ve taken most of the home and small business markets, where they sit on a desk and wait to be sent print jobs. If you need print on the move, though, you can still use an inkjet by carrying a device like HP’s Officejet 100 Mobile.

This is a silver and black box, where the lid lifts to become a 50-sheet feed tray and a small flap folds down from the front, to let pages out onto the desktop. Under the lid are four silver buttons for power, paper feed, job cancel and Bluetooth. In front of this control panel is a flip-up cover which provides access to the twin ink cartridges: one black and one tri-colour.

Two of the key features of a mobile printer, you’d think, would be size and weight. While the Officejet 100 Mobile is certainly smaller than a typical office inkjet, it’s too big, at 348 x 175 x 84mm, to fit in most laptop bags, unless they’re the backpack type. With its supplied Lithium ion battery, it weighs 2.5kg, so an extra bag of sugar to carry, too. HP sells a purpose-made carrying case as an option.

There are two ways of connecting to this printer, via the USB socket on its back and using Bluetooth. There's also a PictBridge socket for connecting enabled cameras. Bluetooth support is provided for Windows Mobile, BlackBerry, webOS and Symbian operating systems. Can you see what's missing, there? In fact, although not specifically mentioned in the spec sheet, basic support for photo printing is available to iPhone and Android devices, too.

Printer drivers are provided for Windows, OS X, Windows Mobile and Linux and HP also includes its toolbox, which provides basic head cleaning and alignment, as well as ink-usage displays.

The two ink and head cartridges clip into carriers, though insertion is a little more fiddly than normal, due to small spring arms which have to be depressed by the cartridges as you’re pushing them into place.