I feel like I must be missing something, but I just don't see what it is... I have a PreferenceActivity with a bunch of various preferences (some are lists, some are just text fields) and it all works fine, but unless I explicitly write each item's value to the summary (which is obviously not intended for this purpose) I don't see how (or where) the items display what they are currently set to. When I click on them the various views show up with the correct settings, but that's clearly not the intention.
Do I have to create my own custom List item of some sort that has a field that displays the currently populated value of each element?
Unfortunately the default PreferencesActivity doesn't display the values: what you're doing is really the way to go if you care to have all the preferences displayed at a glance.