Taking screenshots on your Android phone
A few days ago I showed you how to take screenshots with your Apple iPhone or iPod Touch, doing it on Android is a bit more difficult if you do not have a rooted phone. Here is how to take screenshots with your non rooted Android phone.
1. Start by downloading the Windows USB drivers for your Android phone.
2. On your Android phone go to Settings

3. Select Applications -> Development and check the enable USB Debugging field
4. Now you need to download the Android SDK. Select the Windows version and save the file.

5. Once the download is completed unzip the file to your C:\ drive or somewhere else you would like.
6. After the unzip you will need to download the Java Developers Kit (JDK). Only download the Java SE Development Kit (JDK).
7. Run the JDK installation clicking next all the way through.
8. Now its time to plug in your Android phone via the USB cable.
9. Locate the folder where you unzipped the Android SDK, open the Tools folder and double click ddms.bat
10. A splash screen should pop up for first time users, just click proceed.
11. You should now have the Dalvik Debug Monitor open, select your phone, there should only be 1 listed.

12. After selecting your Android phone go to the device menu at the top and select Screen Capture, or alternatively press Cntr+S
13. The screen capture app should open up and allow you to take screenshots of whatever your Android phone is displaying on the screen.
As you can see it is a whole lot more hassle at first to get this up and running and the drawback is that you can only take screenshots of your Android phone when it is plugged in via USB.
Good news for Android users with rooted phones is that there is several apps available on the Android Market that will enable you to take screenshots without all the hassle as above.
PS. If you don’t own a Android phone, Rafiq over at WebAddict(s) is giving one away.




There has to be an app to do this?
Yes there is, but the apps only work on rooted Android phones.
I was just thinking about this about an hour ago… I wanted to take screenshots of my g1, Then I saw a tweet for this post. Cool how things work like that.
Thanks for the help
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RT @diekloon: New Blog Post: Taking screenshots on your Android phone [link to post] …
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Glad it could be of help to you
[...] iGeek (again) [...]
Hi Sudheendra, as far as I know you can only take screenshot from apps if you have a rooted phone, I have not tried writing an application like this so I can’t really help you our much apart from pointing out that this can only be done on rooted phones.