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Do you wish you print from your Palm while on the road? The compact portable Pocket Printer A6 may just be what you are looking for. This little printer is truly portable it runs on 4x AA batteries or an AC to DC adapter (both included), only weighs 250 grams and prints at 400x400 dpi. The SiPix printer can use cut thermal A6 size paper or paper rolls. If you are using the rolls the print is continuous, so that you can print a continual chart or a very long shopping list.

This little printer is tiny and packs a punch. The quality the printing is quite good and reasonably fast. Throughout testing we primarily focused on printing using the IR port. The printer does have a serial connection as well. Using serial is faster but you need to have a laptop or desktop computer to do this. We were testing for use with Palm so using the IR port just made sense.

Feeding the cut sheet paper in for the first couple of times, I either did not put the paper in all the way or I managed to put it in crooked. After this small learning curve, using the cut sheet paper was  very easy and the printing came out straight. The print quality is 400x400 dpi, on thermal paper.

As you can see by the picture the unit is quite small, for comparison I have place a Palm Vx on top of the unit.

Of course being so small you would not expect to be able to print on standard 8 1/2" x 11" paper. The paper size is A6 or 4.1" x 5.8". A6 size is also a standard postcard. This Pocket Printer can use A6 cut sheet thermal paper or rolls 4 1/8" x 8' 2", this equates to about 15 cut sheets.

The software that currently ships with the unit is a special version of IrPrint v1.2 developed by ISComplete. Using this software you can print from the Palm applications Memo, Address Book, Scheduler, ToDo, Email and Expense. There are also a couple of third party applications that will work as well. If you want to print from a wider variety of third party applications, PalmPrint from Stevens Creek Software is what you would probably like to have. PalmPrint is available as an add-on either directly from Stevens Creek Software or from SiPix.

The following sheet lists what you can currently print from both these applications. 

When using the rolls of thermal paper you can print continuous pages, great for graphs or meter readings. 

The only negative things I can say about this printer are, the noise and the difficulty of getting thermal A6 paper, keep in mind I am in Canada and this may not be the case in the US. I could not find a local retailer that had this size of thermal paper. Making this purchase  online is always an option, at least until this printer or others like it become more popular in your area. I am sure that if they do you will be able to find this size of thermal paper at your local computer or stationary shop.

Final Words:
All in all, this is a good little product, fun and functional. For anyone that might want to print out a hard copy of a memo, email, to do list or address from your Palm while on the road this printer is just what you have been looking for.