What's onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState)

If you save the state of the application in a bundle (typically non-persistent, dynamic data in onSaveInstanceState), it can be passed back to onCreate if the activity needs to be recreated (e.g., orientation change) so that you don't lose this prior information. If no data was supplied, savedInstanceState is null.

... you should use the onPause() method to write any persistent data (such as user edits) to storage. In addition, the method onSaveInstanceState(Bundle) is called before placing the activity in such a background state, allowing you to save away any dynamic instance state in your activity into the given Bundle, to be later received in onCreate(Bundle) if the activity needs to be re-created. See the Process Lifecycle section for more information on how the lifecycle of a process is tied to the activities it is hosting. Note that it is important to save persistent data in onPause() instead of onSaveInstanceState(Bundle) because the latter is not part of the lifecycle callbacks, so will not be called in every situation as described in its documentation.

source

onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) you will get the Bundle null when activity get starts first time and it will get in use when activity orientation get changed .......

http://www.gitshah.com/2011/03/how-to-handle-screen-orientation_28.html

Android provides another elegant way of achieving this. To achieve this, we have to override a method called onSaveInstanceState(). Android platform allows the users to save any instance state. Instance state can be saved in the Bundle. Bundle is passed as argument to the onSaveInstanceState method.

we can load the saved instance state from the Bundle passed as argument to the onCreate method. We can also load the saved instance state in onRestoreInstanceState method. But I will leave that for the readers to figure out.

As Dhruv Gairola answered, you can save the state of the application by using Bundle savedInstanceState. I am trying to give a very simple example that new learners like me can understand easily.

Suppose, you have a simple fragment with a TextView and a Button. Each time you clicked the button the text changes. Now, change the orientation of you device/emulator and notice that you lost the data (means the changed data after clicking you got) and fragment starts as the first time again. By using Bundle savedInstanceState we can get rid of this. If you take a look into the life cyle of the fragment.Fragment Lifecylce you will get that a method "onSaveInstanceState" is called when the fragment is about to destroyed.

So, we can save the state means the changed text value into that bundle like this

 int counter  = 0;
 @Override
 public void onSaveInstanceState(Bundle outState) {
    super.onSaveInstanceState(outState);
    outState.putInt("value",counter);
 }

After you make the orientation the "onCreate" method will be called right? so we can just do this

@Override
public void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) {
    super.onCreate(savedInstanceState);

    if(savedInstanceState == null){
        //it is the first time the fragment is being called
        counter = 0;
    }else{
        //not the first time so we will check SavedInstanceState bundle
        counter = savedInstanceState.getInt("value",0); //here zero is the default value
    }
}

Now, you won't lose your value after the orientation. The modified value always will be displayed.