Android :: Enabling Normal Applications And Handling Large Screens Such As Tablets

I've been studying the screen support of Android and yes, while it is flexible, I still don't see how you can support a "really large" screen like the Samsung tablet is going to have. I think no matter what you end up with lots of wasted real estate. The problem is the Android doesn't automatically "scale up" your application if you run in compatibility mode - rather, it fits it into a postage stamp instead. Because of this, how can you really make an app that will "never" have some postage stamping at all, unless you use all 9patch drawables and Absolute Layouts? (Well, you could draw the GUI yourself, which is what my Reloop Sequencer does). As an example, my drum machine app, Electrum Drum, has a certain layout for the buttons and pads. Now, on a larger screen, it would be nice to just make all the buttons and pads bigger. I need the same layout relationships between all the elements though. Basically I just want a "scaled" up version of the UI. Maybe I can achieve this with 9patch drawables and relative layouts? The issue is I could certainly make "large" graphical elements (if not use a 9patch drawable) but there is no way for something, for example, to know that hey, I have LOTS of space I can use.

Let's say for example, that you want a completely different layout on a tablet - say you want more buttons, etc, on your layout now. You can't do it because there is no way for the android app to "know" that this "large" screen is actually larger than "large". A Droid X probably reports itself as large, although the screen is only 4.x inches or so, where you would not have room for those extra buttons. This is no where near as large as 7" or 10", even at a pixel density of 170 or 240. I think the default behavior would have been better to scale up images in compatibility mode, and if the dev could provide higher res images then it would use them of course (put them in the large high dpi folders), but I don't see how a layout itself can scale correctly in really large cases like a tablet. We need some better explanation of how to handle these cases. I still don't understand how a normal app is going to be enabled to scale up easily. It would have been easy if Android would have just "magnified" the view, but it doesn't.