What's the point of defining strings in xml at the res/values/string.xml directory? Is it more efficient than just defining the strings as constants within your classes? (e.g. Database table creation scripts, etc..)
Is it a matter of organization or is there some benefit in how Android handles these objects in memory?
Context.getString() will return whichever language is the best fit. You can still format it with arguments (%1$s, %2$d), and you can even change the order in different languages.You can easily translate your app if you use strings.xml. Just create a new folder with suffix like values-cs and put the xml with czech strings in it and the whole app will be translated to czech if you have set czech localization in your phone.
The hello string is defined in the res/values/strings.xml file. This is the recommended practice for inserting strings to your application, because it makes the localization of your application to other languages graceful, without need to hard-code changes to the layout file.
For me the first point is the deal breaker, anything to make your app faster. (this is assumed from the countless hours of creating my own applications and being told using string.xml is best from an optimization point of view, plus, especially in a long listview, it does seem to load faster for me (droid A855) )
Context.getString() will call a native function that needs to look up the actual String object using a hash lookup, not to mention that it has to determine the proper language to retrieve it from.