| BEIJING, 23 2
2001
The number of mobile phone users in China nearly doubled to 85.3 million last year, helped by the popularity of services such as short messaging, according to Business Weekly, citing a report from the Ministry of Information Industry.
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Mobile Office warriors with Portable Offices have up till now had to suffer the indignity of only being able to print their output via a hotel's fax machine or at a local print shop. Portable printers have up till now been anything but portable.
That's set to change though with the availability of printers that are as slim-line as they are fast. Most will easily fit into a briefcase along with the notebook. Quality has improved too thanks to new thermal transfer techniques and miniaturization of industry-standard inkjet print-heads. The current models are also increasingly colour-capable.
The rated battery longevity of the new crop of portable printers has also increased from 25 to 150 pages a full charge after a 10 hour recharge period. And thanks to new NiMH and Li-ion battery chemistry, the same amount of charge can be squeezed into a fraction of the size. This has to an extent removed much of the bulk size and weight that handicapped portable printers.
Portable printers currently available in Southern Africa include the Canon BJ 30 and BJC 70, the HP DeskJet 320, the Olivetti JP 50, the Citizen Notebook Printer II as well as the Toshiba Express Writer 201. The Citizen Notebook Printer II weighs just 1.1 kg, but prints slowly . It uses a thermal transfer technique and a cassette-like ribbon cartridge to print. A similar system is used by the Toshiba Express Writer 201. It has tiny dimensions though of 4,4x3,1x8 cm and weighs 850g. It uses NiCd battery.
The Hewlett Packard Colour DeskJet 340 offers excellent print quality with monochrome resolution of 600x300 dpi and colour resolution of 300x300 dpi. The DeskJet also has superior printing speed and simple operation, and weighs 1.9 kg.
Olivetti continues its drive into the mobile office market with the the JP50 bubble ink-jet portable printer. The JP50 one of the smallest portable bubble ink-jet printer on the market, and offers an integrated automatic sheet feeder (ASF) and 30 resident fonts as standard, plus 25 true type soft fonts for windows It is also the first such printer to run off 10X AA batteries - ordinary and re-chargeable . Weighing just 1.1kg, it's output resolution is 300 x 300 dpi onto normal paper and a silent letter-quality print speed of 100 characters per second. The printer comes in a range of colours to match the current Olivetti notebook and printer range (light and dark grey, or anthracite).
The Canon BJ 30 is a larger, more transportable battery-operated portable printer that weighs 1.4 kg, has dimensions of 30x16x6 cm, and prints at around 3 ppm at a maximum of 720 x 360 dpi on plain paper envelope and transparencies. It uses NiMH battery. The Canon BJC 70 is a colour model with much the same dimensions as the BJ 30, except that it prints colour at 360x360 dpi.
Who
to contact in Africa for your mobile office needs?