In honor of Grandparents Day, which was earlier this month, I reviewed a product aimed at older people: a printer that receives e-mail and photos without a computer.
Since I’m not the target audience for Hewlett-Packard’s Printing Mailbox ($150) with Presto service ($10 a month or $100 a year), I enlisted the help of two people: my grandparents. They live in New Jersey and are in their 80s.
The printing mailbox looks like a regular printer and it acts like an enhanced fax machine. It connects to a regular phone line and dials in to check for messages at specified times. It can only receive messages from approved senders.
Pictures can be pasted into the body of an e-mail or sent as attachments, and Presto will convert and print them in color.
Setting up the printer, e-mail address and choosing who can send mail can all be done by calling customer service. But many Presto users receive the printer as a gift from a family member who sets everything up for them by logging onto Presto’s website.
When I called my grandma to ask if she would test the unit, she warned me that she was “biased against e-mail.” Her community has a computer room where she and my grandfather go to read my articles on and to play computer games. But my grandma has never set up an e-mail account because, she says, she’d rather use the phone to communicate and she worries that having an e-mail address would open her up to identity theft and spam.
My father helped them set up the printer. They were all impressed that when they called customer service for help, a representative picked up in less than a minute.
Once the printer was set up, my grandparents received pictures from a wedding they had been unable to attend, a newspaper article by my fiancée, pictures I took of a shuttle launch and e-mail messages from me, my brother and their nephew.
“It’s very low maintenance and user-friendly,” my grandmother said. “Once it’s set up, there’s nothing to it, except to put paper in it, and that was easy.”
My grandfather has glaucoma, so they liked that Presto lets you choose a larger font for printing. They were also pleased that they would only receive messages from approved senders, so they wouldn’t get spam. Another nice feature (which my grandparents didn’t notice) is that Presto can print the sender’s phone number on every message, so it’s easy to call someone back after getting a message.
As part of the service fee, you can have games, recipes, news and other content delivered regularly to the mailbox. My grandma enjoyed having a daily crossword puzzle delivered, but she said it was a lot easier than the ones in The New York Times she does every day.
Raymond Stern, the president and chief executive of Presto, estimates that there are 27 million Americans 65 or older who aren’t connected to the Internet. He said the printer is aimed at people who feel out of the loop because their family and friends are using e-mail to share photos and family news.
In the end, the printer’s helpful and easy-to-use features weren’t enough to convince my grandparents they needed one. Except for me, all their children and grandchildren live within an hour’s drive, so they see them often enough.
