How to take screenshots on any Android Phone?

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After getting a Nexus One, the very first thing as a blogger I wanted to do was to take screenshots of the screen on my Nexus One like I used to do on my iPhone. Strangely enough, that feature was missing on Android and so there is no shortcut that lets you take a quick snapshot of the screen on your favorite Android device.

Well, nothing is impossible in this world. So if you really want to take a screenshot on your Android phone without waiting for Google to release some feature/shortcut of this sort in future Android OS build, please follow this geeky method mentioned below.

You will need the following:

A PC, Mac or Linux machine.
An Android based phone.
Android SDK that you can download from Google.
Complete Java 5 or 6 SE Development Kit (Java SDK) on your computer.

Once you have all of the above available. Follow the instructions below:

Install Java 5 or 6 SDK on your computer.
Unzip Android SDK to a separate folder on your computer where you can find it.
Go to this unzipped folder and run SDK Setup.exe.
After few seconds you will see the application trying to access and download some packages from Google.
At this moment you should probably see an error, “Failed to fetch URL…”. Don’t worry, just remove the ‘s’ from ‘https’ and hit refresh.
Now when you expand the URL in this window, you will need to highlight the latest Android Build and other related packages. Make sure to select “USB Driver Package…”.
Select ‘Install selected’ and wait for some time for the install to finish.

Now before connecting your Android phone yet to PC, enable USB Debugging mode in settings as shown below:

After doing this when you connect your Android phone (Nexus One) in my case, your phone should be detected by your computer and should try to install Google Android USB Device driver which it will obviously fail. But you can manually locate the driver from the unzip folder and install the missing driver.

Note : This is all a one time process. Next time onwards you don’t have to do this all. Also, you are not ROOTING your Android as well.

Finally go to your unzipped Android SDK folder. Go to ‘Tools” folder and double click ‘ddms’ file. That should open up an application “Dalvik Debug Monitor”. In this application your phone should be visible on the left side. Select that and then go to Device – Screen Capture. That should now show your phone on the screen. Just remember to refresh every time you want to grab something different.

I know it is a really lengthy process just to take screen capture of your phone screen. I am sure someone at Google is listening to this request and probably they will incorporate this functionality in the phone itself. But for now that is the only method available for any Android Phone. The usefulness of this functionality of course is mostly only for people who want to write reviews or for those developing the apps. But comparing with iPhone it is a really trivial things which should have been really easy to achieve in Android.

Anyway, hope you like this tutorial about taking screen capture on any Android Phone including Nexus One. Please share and let me know if you use some other method to achieve this functionality.