I don't know: I'm not in the printer business. I do know that out of the many, many, technical and non-technical people I know; I'm the only with a printer connected to a network at home, rather than directly to a computer.

That doesn't follow, unless you mean being able to print to a SMB-shared printer connected to a full-sized computer.

A good point. One could argue that WiMAX gets slightly more press attention and joint-ventures that being able to print.

I'll ignore the sound point as it borders on the edge of facetiousness ;-) (it's positioned as a multimedia device, after all). However, printing is more than just "sending stuff down a printer". Perhaps that's true, if you want to print plain text in the printer's built-in font: that allows you to eliminate the protocol issue, and you're then just into the transport problem.

However, printing even simple graphics, or even text in a font of your choosing, requires overcoming the transport problem ("how do I get the data to the printer") and the protocol problem ("what data do I need to send to this printer").

I suspect you've never tried to implement the latter: it's often hard enough when you're only targetting one printer; but in a consumer device you'll have to support hundreds of models and variants; all speaking different protocols.

You can implement a third party printing framework - there's nothing intrinsic to Maemo which means you can't install CUPS (say). Indeed, CUPS has been ported. The problems are threefold:

1. It's large. I mean seriously large.
2. Printing to a modern printer requires quite a bit of processing power. So it's slow.
3. You can't print from the built-in apps.

(1) could be solved by splitting the package up into a series of bundles for different manufacturers, but that doesn't help you with (2) and (3). (3) would be helped if there's a built-in printer framework, but there's nothing stopping third-party apps (especially if they're ports of existing software) having a "Print..." menu item which drives CUPS.

Different beast: much more storage, much more processing power, ships with an office suite and "proper" USB ports. It also comes with a proper keyboard: printing's a much more natural fit.

It may be important to you (and others). Personally, PIM functionality's important to me (and others).

We can safely assume that given the budget, staff, resource and time available to the ITOS team they're delivering as much software - at as high a quality - as they can. So, which bit of the existing software stack should be cut out to deliver an integrated printing solution?