In particular, the documentation for methods in PrefencesActivity shows many methods deprecated. However, the undeprecated methods are largely introduced in Honeycomb (API level 11). It would appear that if you are coding, as I am, in a pre-Honeycomb API, these methods are NOT deprecated.
So my question is, did I reverse engineer this correctly and is this a documentation bug? Should the deprecated comments actually say “deprecated as of API 11” or give some other indication that indeed these ARE the only choice methods if coding Gingerbread or earlier?
No, not exactly. Deprecated methods still function the way they normally did, it just means that they may not be supported in future releases and that you shouldn’t use them in new code. That said, if you’re targeting devices running older versions of the operating system, you have no choice but to use the deprecated methods.