Speed up virtual android

To run the android emulator fast and smooth - use an x86 image with hardware visualization enabled.
To enable the virtualization: on windows, simple just install the "Intel x86 Emulator Accelerator (HAZM)". The install package could be downloaded using the Android SDK Manager.

On Linux (Debian) make sure the following packages are installed:
qemu-kvm, libvirt-bin

To run the emulator as a kernel-based virtual machine, execute:

emulator-x86 -avd -kernel android-sdk-linux_x86/system-images/android-16/x86/kernel-qemu -qemu -m 512 -enable-kvm