The short answer here is it depends on your Android device.  The rule of thumb here is to have your background be as tall as your device’s vertical resolution, and twice as wide as your devices horizontal resolution.  My HTC Evo 4G for example has a resolution of 800 x 480 pixels, thus my background needs to be 800 pixels tall and 960 (480×2) pixels wide.

In an effort to customize your android device, you may have played around with making a custom background for it and kudos for doing so.  But I know plenty of people (myself included) who had challenges with figuring out the proper dimensions for the background piece.  If the size is not proper, you are forced to crop it and if it is too small you have the likelihood of having a blurred or pixelated end result.

The difficulty here comes down to how Android handles background wallpapers across multiple screens.  Android devices pan the image across all of your screens and you can see this by scrolling through your home-screens and seeing that your background actually shifts a little.  This is the reason that the background needs to be wider than the screen.

Figuring this out removes what is probably the only challenge in making a nice custom wallpaper for your Android phone or tablet.

My Background on my Android Phone

On a side note I have been on holiday for the past week from school and work so I have been enjoying my time off.  Now that I am back into the swing of things I am back to  blog on my usual weekly schedule.  The next few may be short bits like this involving problem solving with design questions, or they may not, I have to write out a few ideas first.  As always thank you for reading and feel free to discuss!