When Grandma Doesn’t Have an Engineering Degree From M.I.T.
If you can’t go over the river and through the woods to Grandma’s house this winter, drop her a line with HP’s Printing Mailbox and a service called Presto. The combination of the service and printer allows you to send e-mail messages and photos to computer-phobic parents and grandparents.
The Printing Mailbox is a printer with a telephone port and a power connector. To set it up, you just plug it in, add some paper and wait for incoming messages. The Presto service (www.presto.com) allows you to add e-mail addresses to a list of trusted senders to prevent spam.
The printer costs about $149 from major online and offline retailers, and the service costs $10 a month or $100 for a year.
Presto can also create newsletters featuring the day’s headlines. Administrators — the grandchildren, most likely — can create and send monthly photo calendars and manage the online mail filter.
The service is designed for the non-techno-savvy, which means settings are kept to a bare minimum. In fact, except for infrequent ink and paper changes, the device is intended to be maintenance-free, much like that other mailbox at the end of the driveway.
This entry was posted on Thursday, December 7th, 2006 at 11:47 am and is filed under world wide web. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
