Long ago I have tried the android emulator and it was hell slow. Here is why:
The android emulator runs on your x86/x64 machine and emulates the android device on hardware layer: It emulates an arm processor along with some other hardware features (like screen, input devices, ...). And to make things worse it used a software based old opengl 1 implementation compiled to arm machine code executed by the emulated arm hardware!!! This is a terribly slow solution. I haven't tried it but today there are x86 based android devices and the emulator also supports x86. If this is true along with the things that has been written on the android emulator site then it is possible to run an x86 emulator with hardware virtualization support but then you should use x86 target when you compile at least when you are debugging. Whether opengl is still hardware/software I don't know (if you use it at all) but even a software opengl would perform much better with this setup.
Check out how to setup an x86 virtual device:
http://developer.android.com/tools/devices/emulator.html[
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I haven't tried it but if the guys implemented x86 emulation well then it must have extremely fast (near to native) execution speed especially if you are developing on a good desktop machine (as long as your x86 desktop machine isn't an ancient one that doesn't support hardware virtualization).
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