Illustrations of emulator usage in books and on the web have emulator skins that look like devices, but if your SDK is at all recent, the emulator doesn’t look like that – the screen is bare. This is a seemingly insignificant thing, but strangely no one seems to talk about it. I didn’t find any documentation explaining this – I had to ask like a n00b on the IRC channel. Well, to save you the embarrassment – it’s pretty simple. For the API 1.5 and before, the emulator looks like a device. For 1.6 and after, it doesn’t. If you really want your emulator to look like that, you need to use an emulator targeted at 1.5 or before – as far as I can tell, there’s no setting you can use to configure 1.6 or 2.0 to show the device skin from 1.5.
Emulators for versions 1.5 and 1.6
