Android Scaling & Density Issues

Question

Update: Some research has turned up that the Asus Transformer TF700T (high end) should have a pixel density of about 224, so the values of 159 android is report

Answer 1

Looks like you do something like I did. I mean you think that AOS chooses resources using DisplayMetrics but thats not true. There is also a Configuration. So for instance I was thinking that my HTC is HDPI for AOS since its really hdpi/240 by DisplayMetrics. But by Configuration its NORMAL. pls look at stackoverflow.com/questions/15837469/… maybe u'r gonna find it useful.
So maybe one of your tablets must use res/large-mdpi and the other res/large-hdpi.

Answer 2

Note: I'm not accepting my own answered so that hopefully someone that knows what is going on with this will take a shot. I'm posting this answer b/c it did solve my problem, but still doesn't address some underlying questions and mysteries.

---

Well, after doing some calculations of my own, it looks as though the high-end device has more accurate Xdpi/Ydpi values, and the lower end device is reporting higher than calculated values. Both have physical dimensions of

length = 7.12"
width = 10.35"

so, we have for the high-end tablet

Xdpi = 1920 / 10.35 = 185.5
Ydpi = 1128 / 7.12 = 158.4

and for the low-end one

Xdpi = 1280 / 10.35 = 123.7
Ydpi = 752 / 7.12 = 105.6

Asus documentation states that

dpi (high-end) = 224
dpi (low-end) = 149

I do realize that android "buckets" devices into 4 groups based on density: low, medium, high, very-high, and assigns the (abstract) dpi value (in /system/build.prop) with preset values based on these: 120, 160, 240, and 320 respectively.

Despite these values, android did correctly report the Density (scaling factor) for each, which was

Density (high-end) = 1.5
Density (low-end) = 1

So, as suggested by android (http://developer.android.com/guide/practices/screens_support.html) for supporting multiple screens, I made two Values folders for two versions of dimens.xml (where the size's were defined):

Resources/Values-Hdpi/dimens.xml
Resources/Values-Mdpi/dimens.xml

and adjusted the values accordingly, where Values-Hdpi/dimens.xml had smaller values to compensate for the 1.5 scaling factor, and Values-Mdpi/dimens.xml had "normalized" values that get scaled by 1. Both tablets now correctly display the correct sizes. But, isn't that what the dp/dip metric is for, so that these separate value sets do not need to be explicitly defined ?