It may not have the same sort of high-tech impact as e-ink, but there's something to be said for reading stuff the old fashioned way with a nice, thick stack of paper -- and Epson would like us to use our phones to do it. The Japanese company has hooked up with Sammy NetWorks to include its muPass platform in printers and phones for managing DRMed e-book content via IrDA -- in other words, buy a book on your phone and beam it straight to your printer over an infrared connection. Epson and Sammy are thinking that the setup will be perfect for distributing periodicals (magazines, newspapers, and the like), individual articles, and out-of-print or limited audience material that can't be justified for a regular production run on the press. Integration should be a snap for phone manufacturers, since Sammy's now managed to cram the muPass system into software. War and Peace, anyone?

While there's a certain novelty associated with an SMS-printing bicycle, the practicality is certainly questionable; however, Nokia is adding yet another dash of ole fashioned utility to "four of its N-series cameraphones." Although details are still a bit slim at this point, we do know that Nokia will be releasing software that allows the "Internet Edition" N80 (and a yet-to-be-announced trio of other N-series mobiles) to order prints from the Snapfish website directly from the phone. Users can presumably order prints from other popular alternatives such as Winkflash, but Nokia hasn't extended official support for any site other than HPs own at the moment. Of course, users can order prints from photos already in their gallery, or they can upload them on the fly via their cameraphone. While attempting to resize, crop, and tweak images to perfection before throwing down for a couple 8 x 10-inch hardcopies on a 352 x 418 resolution screen may not be ideal, we won't complain about extra functionality tossed in gratis.