Summary

See the images of various skins and screens of Android emulator with games (Lunar Lander and Snake) in them. Also shows how to change the skins of Android emulator while debugging your program.

The Skins

The Android SDK includes four skins for emulating different Android devices. The screen sizes for these skins are:

HVGA-L (480X320)
HVGA-P (320X480)
QVGA-L (320X240)
QVGA-P (240X320)

As shown in the list, HVGA has bigger screen size than QVGA. L stands for Landscape and P stands for Portrait. The default skin is HVGA-P. This would be the longish/tallish phone (not wide-ish phone) at the higher resolution (320X480).

Each skin comes with a set of images that make up that particular skin. You can see these images in the following directory under your Android SDK installation:

…\android_sdk_windows_m3-rc37a\tools\lib\images\skins

As you can see, these skins are from the Android SDK version m3-rc37a. Later versions could include additional skins.

The images of Android skins

Following are screenshots of the LunarLander game at various screen sizes of Android emulator:

LunarLander Game on Android - HVGA-L (480x320)

Figure 1. Lunar Lander Game on Android at HVGA-L

Snake Game on Android - HVGA-L (480x320)

Figure 2. Snake Game on Android at HVGA-L

LunarLander on Android - HVGA-P (320X480)

Figure 3. The Android Lunar Lander Game at HVGA-P

Snake on Android - HVGA-P (320X480)

Figure 4. The Android Snake Game at HVGA-P

LunarLander Game on Android - QVGA-L (320X240)

Figure 5. The Android Lunar Lander at QVGA-L

Snake Game on Android - QVGA-L (320X240)

Figure 6. The Android Snake at QVGA-L

LunarLander on Android - QVGA-P (240x320)

Figure 7. The Android Lunar Lander at QVGA-P

Snake on Android - QVGA-P (240x320)

Figure 8. The Android Snake at QVGA-P

How to change the Android Skins?

You can change the Android skins from Eclipse for debugging and seeing your program at different resolutions and modes.

Figure 9. Opening the Debug Dialog

As shown in Figure 9, you can open the Debug Dialog box by right-clicking on the project (here it was LunarLander project).

Figure 10. Debug Dialog box of Eclipse

As shown in Figure 10 above, if you installed the Eclipse Plugin for Android Development, you will see ‘Android Application’ in the Debug dialog box. The projects will be listed below (you can see the Lunar Lander in the list). In the Emulator tab, you will be able to set the screen size (along with the Network Speed and Latency). Other command line parameters can simply be typed in the text box as well.