Feb/March 2007

The technologies of ThinPrint, the small-footprint direct wireless printing specialist, and Cortado, its push email offshoot, converge neatly with a printing facility launched by the company for people with BlackBerry handheld units.

In essence, the technology allows BlackBerry users to print e-mails, attachments and other documents straight from the BlackBerry's menu system to a local fax machine.

What happens in effect is that users 'fax' the document to the fax machine in order to print it out. But they don't pay directly for the fax call; instead, the price is included in a monthly subscription fee of about £5.40.

Once this has been paid, users download an application that sits on the BlackBerry and puts a new fax option on all BlackBerry menus. Cortado is said to support printing in the original format without page limits, as well as documents in Office formats, PDFs and JPEG and TIFF images. It can also print locally-saved information.