You might have come across a situation where you are supposed to show mobile device screen on a desktop, laptop screens; may be at the time of demo or sharing updates with others.
There are some paid tools available in market which does the job however in this article, I am going to tell you about free android utility which helps you projecting mobile screen on the computer.
Name of the utility is Android Screen Monitor.
Android Screen Monitor:
The Android Screen Monitor (ASM) is an android tool to monitor mobile device screen on desktop or laptop.
ASM is an adb client, when it starts monitoring screen, ASM connects to adb on port 5037 and receives frame buffer continuously on the device or emulator and transfer image to your desktop screen.
ASM does provide features like Mobile screen rotation, Screen sizing & Image export.
Pre-requisite:
Before you start with ASM, first make sure that you have JAVA (1.5 or higher) and android SDK installed on machine we are going to use. If not, then you should be able to download them from their respective websites and install on your local.
Another point to be sure about is that environment variables for Java and Android are set in user and system variables as mentioned below.
Android Mobile Device Setup:
Now, is the time to connect android mobile device to your computer through USB. In order to recognize mobile device by the machine, you might have to install android mobile USB driver if not already done.
Then in mobile device, Go to Settings >> Developer Options. Select USB debugging option as selected on my mobile phone; you would also like to select Stay Awake option to restrict your mobile from locking during use.
To make sure everything is set correctly, On your compute, go to command prompt and type “adb devices”. This should show you android device ID, if all the above settings are set correctly.
ASM Download:
Android screen monitor utility can be downloaded from the link mentioned below. Download the zip file and unzip it on your local machine. You should see asm.jar after the file is extracted.
Download Link- http://code.google.com/p/android-screen-monitor
ASM to Project Mobile Device Screen:
Now, that you have the asm.jar file saved on your local folder; let’s again open command prompt on the computer and navigate to the folder where asm.jar is placed.
Once you are in that folder, type the command java –jar asm.jar.
It will pop up a window with details of android devices connected to your computer. Select the device you want to see on computer and it will launch mobile device screen on the computer monitor.
You should be observing that any further action you perform on mobile device, can be seen on computer/laptop screen.
Features:
While I am writing this article, latest version of ASM available is 2.5, which offers few but sufficient features to display mobile on computer. ASM features include :
- Changing mobile window orientation to portrait or landscape by CTRL + P or CTRL + L respectively.
- Sizing window to 100%, 200%, 50 & 75%
- Exporting an image as PNG by CTRL + S
Conclusion:
ASM is actually a great utility for the android users who expect to project mobile screen on computer for various job activities. Being available for free is another advantage of this solution over the paid ones available.
