How is the default screen orientation in android specified? On android phones, the orientation typically defaults to portrait. When you disable auto-rotation, the screen will always remain in a portrait mode.

On android tablets, the orientation typically defaults to landscape. When you disable auto-rotation, the screen will always remain in a landscape mode.

Apparently tablets were not envisioned for use while lying sideways. When I do this, there is no way to get the tablet to remain in portrait mode - with or without auto-rotation the screen is stuck in landscape.

As it is pretty hard for me to change gravity, I am trying to figure out if I can hack my tablet to default to portrait mode. My question is, where would this be set? As I can't find any applications that can force change the orientation I get the impression this is embedded somewhere deep and inaccessible in the operating system. Is this possibly somewhere in the properties file? Is it embedded deep in the hardware? Where can I start looking?

My specific tablet is a Notion Ink Adam Running BeastyRom 2.2.1 + Clemsyn

edit: also asked here: http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?p=14315083#post14315083
It's possible to override the default screen orientation by disabling accelerometer rotation and setting user rotation in the system settings database. The phone/tablet needs to be rooted to do this. The change is applied after the phone/tablet is rebooted.

On the console:

su
sqlite3 /data/data/com.android.providers.settings/databases/settings.db
insert into system (name,value) values('accelerometer_rotation',0);
insert into system (name,value) values('user_rotation',1);
.exit



user_rotation 0 -> ROTATION_0
user_rotation 1 -> ROTATION_180
user_rotation 2 -> ROTATION_270
user_rotation 3 -> ROTATION_90


See http://developer.android.com/reference/android/provider/Settings.System.html#USER_ROTATION for more details