He should stop buying inkjet printers. You can pick up an HP m402dn laser printer on Amazon for $150. It's fast, plugs directly into an ethernet network, and handles full duplex without a hiccup.
Once I realized home laser printers were cheap, I switched and it was the best decision on a printer I'll probably ever make. I can get generic toner cartridges for $15-20 that last a long time, don't yell at me if I don't replace according to their schedule, and print black and white super fast.
The printer I bought was a Samsung and cost right around $100. Compare that to my old HP inkjet that cost more than that and required upwards of 5 ink cartridges.
I don't get color printing out of this but I can't recall the last time I needed to print in color. If I want to print photos, it's cheaper and easier to just order them.
- Mobile internet access was prohibitively expensive (sometimes as high as a penny per kilobyte), browsers were terrible, and some even pushed for an alternative language to HTML for the mobile web. [0]
- Every phone was running a mobile JVM, but apps still had compatibility issues across models and carriers.
- Camera quality was horrid.
- Many phones had poor or inconsistent support for MMS, group texts, and visual voicemail. Even the iPhone itself didn't support MMS at first.
And these were problems even with the devices that were marketed as "smartphones" back then. Mobile phones were awful.
It's a printer, what more innovation do you need?