BERG's Little Printer, a box-sized device announced last November, is ready to ship. The pint-sized printer, which connects wirelessly to the Internet, takes inspiration from traditional halftone lithography as well as pixel art. It gathers its user-defined content via a cloud-based system to deliver a personalized mini newspaper with puzzles, friend’s birthday reminders, weather info and messages from friends appearing alongside the daily news.
Since the November announcement, BERG says it has spent time putting the final touches on the product, such as a mirror finish on the high-gloss injection molded plastic that contains the printer, creating packaging, refining the API for developers, and setting up credit card payment systems.
In addition to the original Lego man-like character face that is framed by the unit's brushed steel faceplate revealed in November, Berg has also introduced three more characters that users can choose from to personalize their unit.
Little Printer comes with a Cloud Bridge device that connects to a router so it can be used without a computer and users can schedule their shopping docket-sized publications via smartphone to arrive at any time of the day or send a message to a friend's printer.
Initial launch content partners include Arup, social network foursquare, The Guardian newspaper and Google, with integration with Google Tasks for printing out your daily schedule.
The first manufacturing run is a fixed size but BERG said it will soon move to a regular production cycle. Developers, publishers and website owners have 60 days to produce bespoke publications for Little Printer and the company has published a handbook (PDF) to help them with that.
Little Printer can now be pre-ordered from the BERG Cloud shop for £199 (US$259) plus shipping.
The original video that got the LIttle Printer so much attention can be viewed below.
Source: BERG
