Chris Brennan reports on an ongoing slice of bafflement in technology. In I can’t see what you did there, he says:

Windows Phones can’t take screenshots. This in and of itself might not sound like a big thing. It is. Here’s why. I have a Windows Phone and it does lots of nice things, however, I can’t show you

In iOS, taking a screen capture isn’t the most discoverable of actions, but once you know how to do so (Home+Sleep), it’s memorable and easy enough1. iOS also now has deep Twitter integration and the upshot of this is that it’s easy to share stills of exciting things you can do with your iOS device.

Other systems have been bewilderingly slow to understand this basic aspect of marketing, in enabling your users to more easily promote your platform. Android, as of 4.0, finally ditched its absurd method of capturing screens, instead more or less aping iOS, but Windows Phone still doesn’t provide a straightforward method to grab a screen. This leads to people taking photos of their devices or, more typically, not bothering.

Brennan:

I asked on Twitter if anyone knew why Windows Phone might not have a screenshot option. I received a reply from Peter Bright or @DrPizza if you prefer: “Their argument is that normals never need to take screenshots. That might be true in general, but it hurts geeks.”

I think it’s wrong to suggest ‘normals’ never need to take screen grabs. My father’s about the furthest person away from geekdom as you can imagine, but he often takes grabs on the Mac, as a back-up when given an online receipt, to rapidly send information to someone, or to fire over a support request to yours truly. All he needed to start doing this was the knowledge of how to take the grabs. The same is true for iOS: once someone knows the grab combo, they can easily share screens of apps and games, or their home screens.

I’m not sure why Microsoft hasn’t followed suit. It could be oversight, or perhaps, as Bright argues, the company genuinely doesn’t want people sharing grabs of its OS, or doesn’t think they want to. But Microsoft’s also the underdog in the mobile space, and with plenty of people praising the Metro UI—often saying how it’s superior to iOS and Android—it’s insane that the same people cannot easily share images of what they are seeing and using.

Microsoft isn’t the only culprit either. It’s interesting to see the differences between Matt Gemmell’s Nintendo 3DS and PlayStation Vita reviews. The latter clearly shows the UI and provides an instant idea of how the system works; the former relies on embedded videos of the device, which look comparatively grainy and therefore do not remotely show off the system at its best.

1 Except, perhaps, when trying to take superb action shots for Tap! magazine of a racing game while skidding round a corner at 150 mph. I might, however, be an edge case there.