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A while back Google released the Android 3.0 SDK along which featured a number of improvements. The new Android version, as you may know, is designed with tablets in mind, however Android continues to be a mobile OS, and Android 3 will come to smartphones too.
One of the new APIs introduced in Android 3.0, called the Fragments API, was designed to make it easier for developers to create applications that work across different screen sizes. A developer can use the API to divide their application’s user interface into multiple fragments, for example an email client might have a fragment for the list of emails, and another for your email itself. Then, on a larger screen device the developer could present both fragments of the UI together, thus taking advantage of the larger screen size, while on a smaller screen device, the email list would be shown, and clicking on an email would then show the email display fragment with the email loaded.
[RELATED_ARTICLE]Unfortunately this API was only available for Android 3.0. Now Google has made available this bit of the functionality to all Android versions above 1.6, thus allowing such developers to use the API while developing applications for any current mobile phone, while maintaining compatibility with the upcoming Android 3.0. The new release is a static library that works with older version of Android, and provide the same functionality if included with the application.
Tthe library is available as part of the Android SDK update called “Android Compatibility Package”.