Well this is embarassing. Remember how (and I quote the common internet assertion) 'Android is not ready for tablets?' As it turns out, the UI has provisions for many different types of UIs that certainly encompass tablets and these have been available since Android v1.0:


http://developer.android.com/guide/t...ng-layout.html
http://developer.android.com/referen...uteLayout.html

The API reveals that the relative/absolute layout UI object, you can pretty much subdivide and arrange the screen however you want, create floating elements, or non-grid organizations. Further more, you can easily listen to resize events and create/hide/resize views as required (eg. screen orientation change, or smaller devices).

What's more is that it appears as though it's extensible by filling frames with other more canvas-like primitives. For example, a game that shows the graphics in a large right pane, and a chat client in the upper left, and world statistics in the lower left.

This is not only is incredibly flexible, it shows that Android has been 'tablet ready' for quite some time, and has a very robust and simple UI system that can handle a variety of screen-subdividing situations. That developers haven't taken advantage of this is more likely a result of Android being -- until recently -- exclusive to smartphones that have smaller screens and thus fewer subdivision possibilities.

Also, in fairness, the UI APIs seem tilted towards linear lists. Many of the layout elements are for linear lists/grids of objects, which may add to why they're more frequently used. But I must state that it is indeed possible to display segmented UIs easily without UI hacking/edge code.

I think the ignorance surrounding the understanding about Android being 'tablet ready' comes from a long smartphone lineage and lack of examples showing these less-known UI features -- and Engadget. The bottom line is, however, that it will be *very* easy to make apps tablet aware, with only a few lines of XML code in many cases defining new and unique view structures to suite the larger displays.

According to Tweetdroid, it only took 2 developers to port their app to Android. And twidroyd made their app tablet aware in the bargain. Expect more apps to quickly follow this trend.