Print anything on your iPhone, wirelessly!

I have a HP Photosmart C4385 All in One printer.

I also have a first-generation iPhone.

And now I can print anything on my iPhone directly to my printer, without even using my computer as go-between. It’s done wirelessly, using WiFi, and the new free app from HP available through iTunes: iPrint Photo (click that to open it in iTunes).

It installs very quickly on your iPhone and works flawlessly for me — without even a need to set anything up.

Starting up iPrint Photo is also fast and you see a list of the photo albums in your iPhone that looks just like when you access your photos through the built-in Photos app. Choose one of your albums and then tap on a photo and the Print Photo page appears with a large blue Print button on on the bottom of the screen.

Just a tap of the bottom starts the printing process. That’s it! No cables to connect, no setup screen… As Chef Tell on “PM Magazine” used to say, “Very simple, very easy!”

Out came a 4×6 inch (10×15 cm) printed picture from the printer.

Can you imagine if you could print your photos this easily while traveling? All it needs is a compatible HP printer that is on a WiFi network.

But I said you could print anything, remember? So far, it looks like you can easily print pictures you’ve shot on your iPhone with this app… but print anything?

Sure! All you need to remember is the handy little feature that was introduced with the iPhone 2.0 software: Screengrabs!

It’s easy to take a screengrab. Hold down the sleep button at the top of the iPhone and then also press the Home button. Release them both at the same time and you’ll see the iPhone’s screen flash white. That indicates you have successfully taken a screengrab of what you had on the screen at the time.

You can make a screengrab picture of anything on your iPhone: a webpage, email, notes, even the calculator. Once you’ve taken a screengrab, it appears in your iPhone’s photo album like any picture you took with its camera. And the iPrint Photo app does as great a job with screengrabs as it does with photos.

Use the keyboard to type in contact information you want to hand to someone you’ve just met, for example, and as long as there’s a compatible HP printer within WiFi net distance of your iPhone, you’re good to go: print it out, then give the print-out to your new friend.

Sometimes you might want to copy and paste something from a web page (a business address, for example) or your brilliant idea you jotted down into the Notes app into one of your iPhone address book contacts and you don’t want to find a pen and paper or can’t remember it. Make a screengrab, print it, then enter it.

Here’s another idea, great for travelling: After getting your route in the Maps program, print it out before you leave the hotel. The print-out is actually larger than it is on your iPhone screen, making it easier to read on the go.

I’m glad that printing has finally come to the iPhone! I’m also glad I previously bought the kind of HP printer this app works with.

Here’s hoping that other printer manufacturers quickly put out apps compatible with their printers, like HP has done.

By the way, the pictures printed this way look exactly like ones which I transferred to my computer first — but i sure saved a lot of time printing them this way!