Why does Android 2.3.3 7-inch tablet use xlarge resources?

My app has different layouts and styles for xlarge screens. This is important because on phones it is used only in portrait and on tablets, it is used only in landscape.

A user contacted me a few days ago, because since I published an update with tablet mockups, he can’t see some objects in my main action (before this update I only had portrait mockups - also on tablets). It uses a 7-inch tablet running Android 2.3.3 and for some odd reason uses layouts and styles from xlarge directories, even if it should use default layouts and styles.

I tested it on an emulator and had the same problem. Then I changed the version of android to 3.1 (did not change the width, height and density), and it worked as expected - default layouts were used.

I do not want to use version qualifiers (layout-xlarge-v13), because then users with older versions of Android who have an xlarge screen will get the wrong layouts. For Android 3.2 and higher, I could use sw720dp, but older versions will not use this, so the problem remains.

I can tell at runtime that the device is not large enough for xlarge layouts, but what can I do in this situation? Is there a way to use default resources?