Portrait Only on Some Tablets Upside Down

[Helihead]

I have noticed that if you select to support Portrait mode only under Project, it seems to work fine on all the phone models I have tested but some tablets display the screens upside down. The simple fix is to change your project settings to support Both. The problem there is that it will try to display in landscape mode even if you have no landscape screens defined for the app and that often looks bad.

The problem seems to be that the app doesn't look at the orientation if you say support only portrait. Most devices know which end is up but some tablets seem to be upside down. When you select to support both, it starts looking at orientation and makes the portraity screen display right side up. It also shows the portrait screen clipped in landscape mode if you rotate without landscape screens available so that can be an issue.

It would be good if the program checks orientation to determine which end is suppose to be up even if you chose to support landscape only.


-Jeff

 

[Erel]

It is the OS that is responsible for managing the orientation.

 

[alexis]

"This side up"

I was also having this problem with an app I published. I didn't notice until a bought a Sony tablet S. It was unnoticeable on other tablets because you rotate the tablet either way, but with the Sony having the wedge shape you hold it in only one portrait direction most of the time. I refused to think it was an OS issue, as I thing that then all apps would behave the same way.


I manually edited the Manifest file and change the android:screenOrientation="Portrait" to "sensorPortait". Please note I wrote sensorPortait (without an 'r') as this is a typo on Google's part. Check the links included.

I tested it on an emulator using Android SDK platforms 3.0 (API 11) and 2.3.3 (API 10) and it seems to be working on both environments.


<activity> | Android Developers
android - sensorPortait typo - Stack Overflow
R.attr | Android Developers