Back in the early 1990’s I had a 386 with 4 megabytes of RAM and a very large 80 megabyte hard drive. That little 386 could do something an Android phone cannot natively do. I could do a screen capture and save it to a file. I thought that for some of my blogs on Android it might be nice to be able to show screen shots and I don’t want to carry a camera with me everywhere I go. I went looking for an application that could capture the screen and all of the apps I found required root access.
After a bit of searching I found out how to capture the screen without root access. You install the Android SDK, which means that you also install the JAVA JDK and something like the Eclipse IDE, and then you can use a utility called DDMS. By the time I was done I had a gigabyte of software installed on my laptop just to do something that even an 8088 with 64k of ram could do.
This really begs the question… to root or not to root, but that is a future blog!
Randy Abrams
Director of Technical Education
ESET LLC