There are many things that our gadgets allow us to do on the move that even a few years ago would have been unthinkable. Mobile phones used to be bricks, and highly unfashionable ones at that; now it’s unusual to go anywhere and not see anyone on at least one mobile phones. Mobile broadband has expanded the ordinary mobile phone into a smartphone, allowing the Web to come to us no matter where we are. Camera phones used to be only for happy snaps, but I’ve seen a number of phones over the past year that could fulfil the camera desires of a large proportion of the population.

An awful lot of that content stays digital, however, and one area I’m yet to see comprehensively cracked is portable printing. I’ve recently been testing Polaroid’s latest portable printer, the GL10, or, to give it its full title, the Polaroid Grey Label By Haus Of Gaga GL10. That’s Gaga as in Lady, and I’ve given my full review thoughts on it -- including how the only thing that’s particularly Gaga-esque about it is the packing box -- over at CNET Australia.

The GL10 isn’t super-expensive itself at $199, but the printing costs could all too rapidly stack up at just under $1 a print. Annoyingly, in the US the same print would only cost you 66c, despite the Aussie dollar being worth more. I’m finding it tough to believe that a small box of 30 sheets of 3x4” paper should invite that much of a premium, but beyond that, at a dollar a shot I’d be awfully tempted if out and about and in desperate need of a print to just drop into a print shop and get a 20c 4x6” photo shot.

Pricing may be only one of the challenges for portable printing, along with things like battery power, connectivity and file formats, but it strikes me it’s a key barrier to the adoption of truly portable printing taking off the same way that phones and mobile broadband already have.