Take Android Screenshots Without Root

Here's a quick tip that often gets overlooked amidst the madness. Since everyone loves to show off their Android home screen setup, Let's talk about how to do it if you're not rooted and not running a home replacement. This works for all devices regardless of any home customizations done by the handset maker. Hit the break to follow along.

The first step is setting up the SDK on your computer. We covered that for Windows users in-depth here, so we will touch briefly for you folks running a Mac or Linux.

• Make sure you download the correct sdk for your platform.
  
• Make sure you're up to date with the Java Run Time Envrionment from Sun.
  
• Mac users: Update this from the Apple menu, Ubuntu users sudo apt-get install sun-java6-jre.
  

After you have the SDK all set up, the hard part's over. Just follow along and you'll be taking screenshots in no time.

1. Plug your phone into your computer and start up the ddms tool. On a Windows machine, you open your SDK\tools folder and double click the icon (see the picture below). On Linux or a Mac, open your terminal in the sdk/tools and enter ./ddms

The Android sdk\tools folder

2. Make sure you select your device from the list in the right pane of the ddms application, then select device -> screen capture from the menu bar. See the picture below.

The ddms utility window

3. Grab your phone, set up the image you want to grab, and hit the refresh button (see the image below). When you're satisfied with the results, click save and tell the ddms app where to save it.

The screen capture interface

And that's it!