Why is the setting called "full screen" when it is

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I got a new droid cell phone last weekend. This is my first smartphone. I like it but when I watch videos on it the video does not fill the whole viewscreen, there is black all around. But I have the setting set to large view full screen. Turns out its not just this phone, a freind of mine with a blackberry says its the same on his phone as well.

Why do companies mislead and lie? Why call it full screen when it does not fill the screen?

There appears to be 3 aspect ratios. 4:3, 16:9 and 16:10. 16:10, I feel is a larger version of 4:3.

The question is; are there black lines around the screen all the time?

You didnt get messed up, what happened is that the phone is set to full screen for watching the movie, but the movie itself is in a different aspect ratio. 16:9 is the theatrical ratio, whereas 4:3 is standard TV. Because of that, a 16:9 film shown on a 4:3 screen will have black bars on the top and bottom to cover the space. Word of warning though, movies for home entertainment will be going toward the 16:9 ratio to preserve the original movie, so 4:3s days is numbered (or will be). Theyre doing that because 1/3 of a movie's visual content is lost from transitioning 16:9 to 4:3.

Actually, without any intervention, the video will NOT be scaled to fit. By default, a 16:9 video will fit into 4:3, but the ends will be cut off. And a 4:3 video will probably be stretched to scale a 16:9/16:10 screen.

Yeah for some unknown reason, a lot of these devices won't upscale video. They usually downscale though. So to get fullscreen, the video has to be the same or higher resolution than the screen. They usually honor the aspect ratio too. So wrong aspect will also introduce letterbox.