NIIMBOT B21 Label Maker, Portable Bluetooth Label Printer for Small Business, Sticker Maker with Tape for Gift Barcode, Clothing, Retail, Bakery, Mailing, Candles, Jewelry, Craft Organizing,Green

An easy to use printer that looks fairly stylish
I have a thing for thermal label makers. Most of the ones on Amazon use the same thermal labels and are really inexpensive to use.This one is different because it’s stylish enough to give as a gift.Yes, you can’t print to it directly so you have to use the mobile app but it’s worth it because it’s got a nice design. It looks like a tiny 50’s receipt printer. I like it!In terms of speed, it’s fairly fast, but not faster than some of the fastest receipt printers. In terms of resolution it’s about mid-grade. Don’t try to print grayscales on it without halftoning first.

Nice label maker, awful software that messed up my computer
I really wanted to love this label maker. Its design is sleek and the build quality seems excellent. It prints quickly and precisely. It pairs and connects to my Android phone via Bluetooth effortlessly and to a USB port on my Windows 10 laptop via an included cable. It comes with a roll of labels approximately 2” x 1-1/4”; replacement labels cost about 2 cents each – 1380 labels for $30, not unreasonable.So what’s not to like : THE SOFTWARE, particularly the computer software.The phone app seemed well-behaved but not intuitive and I found it hard ro use. I’ve never mastered thumb typing on a phone’s virtual keyboard, and the app’s text box was tiny and hard for my somewhat impaired eyes to see. In addition, the app allows you to position the text on the label, but the edges of the displayed label don’t contrast well with the background; it’s too easy to print a label with only part of the text on it. Altogether a somewhat tedious process, but doable.I thought that the downloadable Nimbot Windows software would be better, at least allowing me to type on a real keyboard and position the label text more easily on the label. Again, the program was not intuitive but learnable. At first, although the software recognized exactly which Nimbot label maker was connected, down to its serial number, it didn’t recognize which label stock was inserted in the printer and refused to print. (This feature of the software knowing what “consumable” is loaded in the printer worked well with the phone app; the implication is that the printer will work only with Nimbot labels.) I returned to the computer software a few times, searching for some setting I could change to fix the problem. I never found a setting to change, but suddenly the program recognized my label stock and would print. I noticed some other odd behaviors by the program: it could not be shrunk to operate in a window, it blocked access to the Windows taskbar, and it required going through the installation permission protocol every time it was opened. All of this was unsettling enough to lead me to uninstall the PC software and knock 2 stars off my rating.The label maker is still usable with the phone app. Whether you wish to spend $65 for a cute device that has software problems is up to you. As noted above, I received this one free, so I’m keeping it.