Companies like Apple and Google are eager for mobile users to do more of their computing on the go, and that extends to printing and scanning. It's easier than you might think to print out a PDF or to scan in a document using nothing but your phone.As you might have expected, there are apps for all of these tasks, and if you know the right ones to use you can greatly increase your mobile productivity. These are the apps you need to know about, and how to get them working for you.

As you may have noticed, your smartphone comes with a camera attached, which can double up as a scanner. You might not get the high-resolution, pixel-perfect copies you would from a real flatbed scanner, but these cameras are usually more than capable when it comes to scanning documents and forms.

Several apps will do the job for you, or you can snap a picture using your phone's default camera app and store your scan as an image somewhere. If all you're scanning are images (perhaps photos from an old album), then this is probably the best approach.