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Travellers routinely use laptops, but quality printers are too bulky to carry around. And borrowing one is often a pain because the laptop needs printer-specific “driver” software.

However, Hewlett-Packard has a neat answer (US 2003/69915). Hotels could in future put a printer in every guest room, connected to the hotel network. At check in, guests are given an authorisation code. In their room they can log onto the hotel’s website where the authorisation code lets them send letters and other documents as print jobs via the hotel network to the printer in the guest’s room.

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