Android apps on tablet: what will they looks like?

Jeff — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 19:59:20 +0000

We’ve seen many upcoming Android tablets, but apps from the Market were never showcased. Some people tend to think that the apps will look bad in high resolution, so I’ve decided to check it. Below go the screenshots of apps running on Android 1.6 x86 in VirtualBox. Screen resolution was set to 1024×768.

As you can see, most apps looks just fine thanks to “liquid” Android UI. This means: a) no “pixel doubling”, b) it’s possible to make a single UI layout for all devices and c) many application from Market will work on tablets without any change in code.

However, many other applications (Fring, Movies, Shazam, Seesmic,…) refused to install. I guess large screens support is disabled in these apps until real tablets appears on the market.

How to adapt your apps for the tablet resolution?

On the UI design screen in Eclipse, select “Custom…” in Devices drop-down box. Create a new device with 1024×768 screen resolution and medium density. Now you can preview how your UI will look on a tablet.

Unfortunately emulator in Android SDK doesn’t support typical tablet resolutions yet. You can use live CD from Android-x86 project to run and debug apps.

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Android apps on tablet: what will they looks like?