Nokia Adds Mobile Printing Service

Software in four of Nokia's Nseries camera phones will enable users to order prints of their pictures for store pick-up or home delivery from services such as Hewlett-Packard's Snapfish. The new software will add to the printing capabilities of the phones, which can already connect to certain printers over USB or a Bluetooth wireless connection.

Nokia's software will allow Snapfish users in the U.S. to order prints from their online photo gallery directly from an N80 Internet Edition camera phone. They can already upload pictures to their gallery from a variety of camera phones, but so far prints can only be ordered over the Web from a PC.

The N80 will ship in the U.S. before year-end, Nokia said, but users elsewhere will have to wait a little longer.

Availability Abroad

HP operates online photo storage and printing services under the Snapfish or Pixaco brands in 14 European countries, including France, Germany, Italy, the U.K., Sweden and Norway.

In the Nordic countries, Nokia will also work with software and service developer Sapio to establish links with online photo printing services, Sapio chief executive officer David Hunter said Tuesday. By the end of this year, new phones will contain configuration files for the printing services, allowing users to send a picture for printing as soon as they have taken it, Hunter said.

International Pricing Undecided

The printing services will use Sapio's software to transmit details of the features they offer, and set their prices, Hunter said. Network operators may add on charges to transmit the data making up the digital picture, however. For Nokia's latest 2M-pixel or 3M-pixel camera phones, that can amount to 700K bytes or more per image, Roine said.