Can someone help me visualize this example about different screens sizes?

Question

I always have difficulties when it comes to supporting multiple screens on Android and completely understand the concepts like dpi etc. Thus, I decided to study it one more time from the beginning. I saw this example in Android developer web site:

The characteristics that define a device's generalized screen size and density are independent from each other. For example, a WVGA high-density screen is considered a normal size screen because its physical size is about the same as the T-Mobile G1 (Android's first device and baseline screen configuration). On the other hand, a WVGA medium-density screen is considered a large size screen. Although it offers the same resolution (the same number of pixels), the WVGA medium-density screen has a lower screen density, meaning that each pixel is physically larger and, thus, the entire screen is larger than the baseline (normal size) screen.

I cannot understand how these two devices have the same resolution and the same physical size but different densities.

If they have different densities and same physical size shouldn't they have different resolutions thus different number of physical pixels?

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Can someone draw an illustration for this and these type of concepts? I have a really hard time visualizing these things.

Thanks.

Quamber Quamber · Accepted Answer · 2013-06-22T16:18:43

With 1600+ android models even after they are categorized in few Screen size and a few DPI's its very difficult to manage layouts.. i suggest that you just concentrate on designing layouts w.r.t to screen size and then create views as Resized Views to neglect density effects.

Here is the Documentation for Supporting Screen Sizes

Once you have created your layouts Resize the Views .. You can create a Custom View or resize on its onMeasure();

Can someone help me visualize this example about different screens sizes?

2 Answers