Learning Android™ Application Programming: A Hands-On Guide to Building Android Applications

Building for Various Screen Sizes

Another issue is that the most common device screen sizes and densities may be different in other countries. A large portion of the recent growth of Android devices outside the United States has been in lower-cost devices that have smaller, lower-resolution screens.

As you have seen in previous chapters, resource qualifiers enable you to supply different layouts based on screen density, size, or orientation. Screen pixel sizes can range from 240 × 320 pixels to 2560 × 1600 pixels (and possibly higher), physically from a 1.5-inch screen to a 10-inch screen, and have a pixel density of less than 100 dpi or more than 600 dpi.

Android 3.2 introduced new resource qualifiers, in part to deal with the difference between ...