HP Hotspot Printer: Setup a fully Wireless Office in Minutes!

Recently, I installed a HP wireless All-in-One printer at my Home Office primarily for my wireless printing and scanning needs. However, having used it for over a week now, I can say that this newly launched HP Hotspot Laserjet pro M1218nfs MFP turned out to be much more than what I had expected.

HP Hotspot is first printer in the world to have hotspot and networking features built into it, making it an ideal all-in-one router/printing/scanning/networking/copying/faxing device for any small office environment. Infact, I can go to an extent to say that this will probably be the only device that may be required by startups or Individuals who are newly setting up their office.

The most impressive feature for me has to be the HP ePrint service. The HP Hotspot Laserjet pro M1218nfs MFP printer is ePrint enabled, which means you can print to the printer from virtually anywhere in the world by simply sending an email. Lets look at these features in little more detail

Features of HP Hotspot Laserjet pro M1218nfs

The printer obviously has all the traditional features that a LaserJet printer should have, including 18 ppm printing, document copying, scanning and also Fax (I doubt anyone uses it now). But the 3 other features – Wireless Hotspot, Airprint and HP ePrint – are something that are really useful especially for startups.

Wireless Hotspot & Direct Print

As the name suggests, the printer acts as a hotspot. Just plug the internet cable (RJ 45) in the provided port and you are ready to go. At initial setup you will just need to go through a simple setup process and install the driver, and you are nearly done. HP Smart Install automatically installs printer within minutes, without the need for CD installation. The HP Hotspot printer allows upto 8 wireless user connection making it an ideal networking setup for a home or small office.

Any of the hotspot connected devices can also directly print to the printer without any hassle.

Airprint

Airprint is more useful to iPhone and iPad users – where the iOS based devices can directly print anything on from their devices directly to the printer (without installing any software). Airprint is basically a feature implemented by Apple on their recent iOS versions for printing requirements on wireless LAN. See the video below regarding more details on Airprint.

Hp ePrint

Like I mentioned before, this undoubtedly is my favourite feature and I am sure to use it quite frequently. ePrint allows anyone across the world to print to your printer just by sending an email.

Every ePrint enabled printer has a unique email address attached to it (which you can even customize after creating an account on ePrint website). A user who needs to print a document, image or anything else has to send it as an email attachment to that specific email address. Once the email is sent, generally within about 10 to 15 seconds the printer will out all the documents that have been sent to printer.

Imagine, how easy it will now be to get anything printed from anywhere. Know more about ePrint on their official page.

The goodies don’t stop there – and this is especially useful for people who are Google Docs users. The ePrint enabled printers can directly print from Google docs using the Google Cloud print platform.

Pricing

There is no doubt that HP Hotspot Laserjet pro M1218nfs is one of the most complete printers I have come across. It can probably print anything from any device from any place. However, in my view, even with all these features, a retail price tag of Rs. 18,306/-, is higher than what I would have liked.

Notwithstanding the slightly higher price, I would recommend this printer to all startups and small businesses who are looking at a building an efficient, smart and connected office!