The iPhone Printer Case

The founder of hardware startup Prynt has lined up a collection of his company’s prototypes on a table. He’s arranged them in order, so as you scan from one end of the line to the other, you can chart the evolution of Prynt’s device from idea to finished product. The models all vary in shape, size, and materials. One early model is bright pink and feels waxy, another has more physical buttons than the rest. Some are just circuit boards. Though they all certainly share some DNA with his company’s finished product: a mini-printer that connects to your phone and spits out photos.

Perrot seems a little stunned by how many prototypes there are. “Now I remember what I did in the last two years,” he says.

In November of 2014, Prynt started showing off an earlier version of its device. The French company had just soft-launched at a hardware demo day and was ready well, almost read to bring its product to consumers. So what does a young hardware startup do when it wants to test the market waters? Head to Kickstarter!

For the last year, Prynt’s been on Kickstarter, and now, finally, units are going to ship. The device is also being made available for pre-order on Prynt’s own site ($149 for the printer, phone adapter, and 10 pieces of photo paper).

Just like the preview we saw last year, the Prynt case is a retro-looking box reminiscent of a Polaroid camera, and it uses mini Zink photo paper strips ($25 for a pack of 50) to print the pictures stored on your phone. The device uses thermal printing technology, so there’s no ink, just heat, to create the image. The Prynt app has all the Instagrammy features you want filters, namely plus other effects, like stickers and meme-ify options. The adapter that connects your phone is sold separately, but that’s a decision the company made to allow for multiple adapters to all work with the same base unit. There are currently adapters for iPhone 6s, 6, 5s, 5c, 5, and Samsung Galaxy S5 and S4. It comes in black or white, and while it’s definitely bulkier than a standard phone case, it’s fairly sleek for a printer. It’s a little plastic-y, a bit toyish, and there’s a little finagling to be done to get the adapter connected. But, really, that’s OK because Prynt is a whole lot of fun.

Get Physical

The goal of the team was always to create something physical. “Hardware is hard work,” says Perrot. “It’s so difficult, but that’s what we like that you create something that people can touch. When you are making an app, you are not only competing against other applications that do the same thing, you are competing against every application on your phone. Now it’s more about getting people’s attention when you have something they can hold, you have their attention.”

As a bit of a surprise, Prynt has added an augmented reality component to its device a feature that wasn’t originally revealed when the startup first announced the product.

Within the Prynt app, after you capture a photo, you take a short, six-second video afterward that “attaches” itself to the photo via the cloud. After you print it, anyone can use the app to scan the photo and reveal the video. Soon, Perrot says, you will be able to attach other types of content: a song clip, a still shot of something, GPS coordinates. Perrot says you could almost use it like a digital business card, taking a picture of yourself and a person and attaching an image of your phone number or contact information.

You have the option to make this content private as well, so only certain people can unlock it. It’s sort of like a QR code, but vastly cooler. The effect is a novelty, to be sure, but it’s a really fun one and it works really well. It’s a nice, easy intro to augmented reality wrapped in a product anyone will want, and everyone can understand: an Instagram-like photo printer.

The case connects directly to your phone via microUSB or Lightning. The team fiddled with Bluetooth but found it too complicated. “It was such a struggle to pair every time you wanted to use the product,” says Perrot. And really, part of the reasoning for the “simpler” connection process was a small homage to what’s a nostalgic piece of technology. “We just wanted people to have the same experience as with old printing cameras you take a picture…and it just prints.”