As has been said before necessity is the mother of invention.  I have wasted a lot of toner and paper to write this…….

I have tested and tried Android printing. Many of the solutions seem convoluted such as the Samsung  Android and iThingy (heretofore referring to iPad, iPod, and iPhone) utilities. Although I see it as insanity that I have a network direct Xerox Phaser 6125N and a Samsung ML-1675 connected to a print server I did not like the fact that the Samsung utility would not run on the older PowerPC Mac-Mini. In fact I should not need it running on any computer AT ALL!  The Xerox Android  and iThingy print utility “Printback” runs on Windows and Intel Macs only, and apparently does not support anything other than Xerox Printers anyway. The Samsung utility “Mobile Print” only seems to support Network direct Samsung printers, although I did see the Samsung printer via CUPS on Mac Mini  OSX 10.5 in the Samsung Mobile print utility.

First I must scold Xerox for making such a lame utility that does not even allow true network direct printing from Android or iThingies to network direct Xerox Phaser 6125N

One interesting thing struck me while looking at Android print utilities though, one package said it would print to ANY printer connected to a shared from a Mac. This was Called PrinterShare (Ithingy and Android) and allowed the use of a “generic” driver to a Mac. It appears that this reminded me of the olden days when I printed from a classic Mac to a convoluted Ghostscript configuration on a Windows machine, but this was in in reverse. In other words printing Postscript to the Mac OS X CUPS server seemed to do the job.  The Mac seems to happily receive the postscript and reformat it for the configured printer. It appeared this “generic” driver sends postscript. Unfortunately Printershare seemed high priced at $12.95 and the free version only prints a test page. The good news is that testing on another network showed me that Printershare printed just fine to the HP CP-1215 on a generic multi-protocol print server, DIRECTLY with no intermediary, at least the test page anyway.

There are some other print utilities and most of my remaining testing was done with PrintBot From Zenofx.com. PrintBot is unique in that it allows you to manually configure the printer. Most of these utilities, like EFI’s PrintMe Mobile, and Printershare will so far not automatically recognize printers connected to Ubuntu 10.10 but will recognize Mac OS printers shared with CUPS. I think this may be due to Bonjour advertising. Some of the utilities will allow manual configuration via LPR or IPP to the CUPS server such as Ubuntu or Mac OSX.  I registered Printbot but immediately refunded when I realized that I could not name the printers. That’s almost as lame as Xerox requiring me to use a go between for a network direct printer from Android. I do however believe that PrintBot and Send 2 Printer are the most versatile of these utilities as they allow manual configuration of printers, and in many cases may be the best chance of attaining network direct printing without an intermediary CUPS server. So our intermediary CUPS server allows us to print postscript from Android or iThingy and the host CUPS server reformats the print job for the corresponding configured printer. All we need is almost ANY of these iThingy or Android apps with a generic postscript driver and viola!

iThingy users see here: http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2362451,00.asp

Now for Windows users this is also doable as I had indicated in the beginning of this post that I used to use a windows print server from a Classic Mac. I sent Postscript from the Mac and Windows and Ghostscript via Redmon took over to reformat the job for the configured printer. I believe there is even CUPS for Windows.

EFI PrintMe Mobile seems to consistently provide the best quality however will only seem to recognize Mac OS CUPS Printers and not Ubuntu CUPS printers. It is therefore useful only in an Android to Mac environment or with their proprietary print server software, which I believe is for windows.

________EDIT_____________________
There is more information at the links below for setting this up in Windows, however I can not seem to find more up to date information for Windows 7, nor good information on CUPS for Windows , although CUPS I can assure you is not necessary. Also noteworthy I have seen somewhere references to a Microsoft Postscript interpreter which may be an alternative and more integrated to Windows 7.

Creating a virtual Postscript printer in Windows (older but complete)

Configuring a Virtual Printer Using RedMon 1.7 on Windows 7

Also noteworty is that is you go into Add remove windows components there is an LPD printer server option, meaning that once the virtual postscript printer is configured, you can  Share it via LPD/LPR which will work with many of the Android apps and some of the iThingy apps.

________EDIT_____________________

There you have it , so print away from your handheld.. I imagine that one could even use XBMCbuntu for this as well. One remaining question is whether I can configure print services and CUPS on jailbroken Apple TV 1.

_________2nd edit___________________

Well, as of this edit it looks like CUPS 1.6 and higher support AirPrint. We have integrated the AirPrint support into our Apple TV 1 Linux image (LinATV) so any Apple TV 1 now not only can run Frodo but offer AirPrint (as well as AirPlay and a host of other services even for Windows) services to any configured printer in LinATV CUPS as well as offer Point and Print printing to Windows and Auto discovery of  printers on other CUPS  which also means Mac OSX. because Avahi CUPS and the printing back-ends are now more tightly integrated it seems this is an AirPrint solution out of the box, even for iOS 6+. We have tested with Cups 1.61 which is found in Ubuntu 12.10 or higher.