Android Wear has many great features for those that want to be more easily connected to their notifications. It offers up some nice ways to reply with a hands free nature too and now with the latest update you can do some cool stuff like hide notifications off display, and now store music on the 4GB hard drive with Google Play music so you can play music offline if you’re out running or exercising, and eliminate having to carry your phone with you. One thing that Android Wear is still missing though is an easy native way to take screenshots without having to hook up to the computer and navigate your way through the ADB process to grab them.
Currently that is the only way you can take a screenshot of your Android Wear device, and although not ideal it is still a way to grab them if you need them, so we’re going to run through the How To for you so that you can get any screenshots of your Android Wear device that you need. The first step requires you to install what is called the 15 seconds ADB Installer. You can grab the download from the XDA thread here. Download and find the file and open it up to install, at which point a series of instructions will pop up on screen in the newly opened menu, which you can see from the screenshot that Phone Arena took below. All you have to do is type up ‘Y'(no quotes)to initiate a yes response for the first and second prompt, then type N for no on the last prompt.
You also need to make sure that you have developer options enabled on your Android Wear smartwatch, and once enabled you’ll have to turn on USB debugging on for the watch as well. Go into your smartwatch settings menu and navigate to About, enter it, then find the build number and tap on it seven times which will enable developer options. Open up developer options and you’ll scroll to find the USB debugging option, make sure to turn it on. Next, get a command prompt box open and type up the following without quotes, spaces and all. “adb shell screencap -p /sdcard/screenshot.png” Once you have that type in hit the enter key, which should create a new separate line in the command prompt box and initiate the screenshot.
The next step has you entering more text into the command prompt box as you’ll need to grab the screenshot from the internal memory of your Android Wear device where it resides. In the new line created type up the following without quotes, spaces and all. “adb pull /sdcard/screenshot.png C:/” After you type that up hit the enter again, and this will save the screenshot that you took earlier to the C drive on your computer. At this point you can enter your PC’s file explorer(my computer if you’re on Windows 7 or below)and navigate to the C drive where you should find the screenshot. That’s all there is to it. It takes a little more time but for now that’s all we have. Hopefully that will change in a future update.
