HP Photosmart Premium with TouchSmart Web: an all-in-one printer glued to an iPod touch, with a capacitive touchscreen and an App Store!
It’s been a very very long time since I was exciting about using a printer. A bit like using an uninterruptible power supply or a backup system!
But with it’s latest all-in one printer/scanner/fax, H-P makes printing cool again.
The Photosmart Premium with TouchSmart Web (with the money H-P spends in marketing, it could have easily found a more shorter and sexier name!) uses the same printing engine than the currently shipping Photosmart Premium C8180 – a Wi-Fi/Bluetooth multi-function printer which it will be replacing – but with an iPod touch-like capacitive touchscreen instead of the current smaller screen and series of buttons, and combined with H-P’s Apps Studio; yet another applications store.
H-P takes a page from the iPhone playbook and starts an Apps Store for printers
And just as with the iPhone, Palm Pre, etc., it will soon be possible to download apps for your printer!
At the launch event earlier today hosted at Al Gore’s Current TV studios in San Francisco, H-P showed apps from USA Today, Google, Fandango, Coupons.com, DreamWorks Animation, Nickelodeon, Web Sudoku, Weathernews as well as the company’s online site Snapfish.
With these apps, you’ll be able to customize, choose, print… daily news, maps, coupons, coloring pages, movie tickets, recipes, personal calendars and more – all at the touch of a finger.
Under the hood, the Web printer is running Linux with Nokia’s Qt application and graphical-user interface framework.
The Photosmart Premium with TouchSmart Web will be available in the U.S. in September for $399 (the current Photosmart Premium, model C8180, is being discounted at less than $250 on Amazon.com) and next year for the rest of the world.
Here’s an excerpt of our exclusive interview with product marketing manager Ravikiran Adusumilli, going into more details on the printer capabilities (Wi-Fi setup, touchscreen, micro-transactions, auto-duplex printing…) that took 1.5 years to get to market:
Posted by TechPulse 360 
