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Printing from a PDA or smartphone is complicated, often requiring vendor-supplied device or application-specific drivers and software to turn bits and bytes into paper. To ease the integration of its MPrint MW-140BT mobile printer with third-party applications for Bluetooth-enabled BlackBerrys, Brother has partnered with DynoPlex on a Universal Printer Interface (UPI).

Brother's thermal MPrint MW-140BT printer measures a mere 6.3 x 3.9 x 0.7 inches and weighs less than 11 ounces.

The thing about printing with PDAs is there's no generally supported printing standard. It is not like Windows where you load a printer driver and it prints. With mobile devices, you must have some type of separate printing utility - that you can buy or is bundled (as in the MPrint MW-140BT's case) - to print a document.

With the new UPI, independent software vendors and corporate IT departments can extend printing to the MPrint MW-140BT beyond BlackBerry Messages, Tasks, and Calendar applications with little or no development effort, according to Brother Product Manager John Biancamano.

Developers simply plug the UPI into their Java-based BlackBerry apps and it’s ready to go.

"Normally when you see a mobile application that's built for BlackBerry - and this is also true for Pocket PC and Palm as well - you don't see a lot of printing because the printing architecture is not included in the device," Biancamano said to PDAStreet. "As they're getting more and more accepted in the enterprise space, you see more applications becoming available, especially in the PDA and BlackBerry world, printing is going to be a need - actually a requirement. And we're seeing this starting to take place. "

Today, with handhelds, you create a document within a Pocket PC application, close the software, and then open it up in a separate utility to print it. "That's just the nature of the PDA world. There's not enough room for a printing architecture," added Biancamano.

To integrate printing with the MPrint MW-140BT into an application before the UPI, you would have to use Brother's software developer kit (SDK) to essentially write your own printer-specific driver.

With the UPI, Biancamano says they've come as close as possible to writing an actual printer driver for BlackBerry, "It is not as simple as installing a printer driver in Windows and saying okay and print, but it's almost that simple."

Biancamano explained, "We wanted to short cut the process to make it easy for people to print without having to write their own printer driver. All they have to do is drop our module into their code, recompile it, and they're able to print essentially."

"What you have to do is basically take our printer driver and compile it with your enterprise application and you then have you’ll have the capability of printing your data through the Bluetooth interface," he added.

The MPrint MW-140BT is aimed at anyone who needs to print something in the field, such as sales and service personal. In field sales, for example, you may need to leave behind an order confirmation or customer receipt without having to go back to the office. On the service side, a repairman or safely inspector may have to place a label on something.

In addition to BlackBerry, the printer, which comes in two additional models, also supports Windows, Windows Mobile and the Palm OS.