the kindle-berry won't run the virtual device. I have read this is due to its low RAM and processor power. Is that correct?
That would be a major stumbling block. I would not want to bother trying Android development on a machine with only 1 GB of RAM, although that doesn't mean it is completely impossible, at least via the use of swap.
The problem with this is if you are using a lot of it (e.g., more swap than RAM), the fastest potential for this on the Pi is going to be ~30 MB/s via USB (that potential will not even be halfway met most of the time). I'm not sure of the actual memory bus speed used on the Pi; the RAM itself is I think 900 Mhz, although there's a clock used set to less than half that, but it still probably isn't a significant bottleneck (i.e., the CPU does not have to spend much of its time waiting on RAM).
In any case, 0.25 - 1 GHz transfers on a 32-bit bus still equate to speeds at least several orders of magnitude faster than anything that will be possible with swap. So think about many things taking hundreds of times longer to complete.
A further problem is that the x86(-64) processors used on most normal computers have evolved a lot of support for virtualization. I believe this really only applies to virtual instances of the same architecture, but in general, consider x86 more performance oriented and feature rich than ARM (the Pi, and most mobile devices). What makes things like the Android emulator feasible are muscular x86-64 CPUs and a massive amount of fast RAM. The ARM family fills a different niche with different priorities (lower power consumption and production costs). Emulation is still possible, but as an example, a number of years ago someone got a version of MS Windows running in an emulator on an Rpi model B. It took 20 minutes to boot.
Of course, most Android devices are ARMv7 or 8, so this is less of a stretch than emulating a PC for Windows. However, I still think it will be a waste of time, which is why as far as I am aware no one has bothered compiling the Android emulator for the Pi.
You might still be able to run IntelliJ or Eclipse usably, and adb is available for Raspbian, so you might even be able to compile code and test it on an attached device. I would not recommend this to people though. I think in the end it will not be very worthwhile (though people who did a lot of programming in the 70's and 80's would probably chuckle at that).
There are, of course, other things besides Android to study that are much more suited to a Pi.
Can the Pi be connected to my computer so I can use the RAM in the laptop (8 GB), instead of the Pi?
No. At least, not in a way that isn't constrained by the same transfer speed bottleneck as the swap problem already described, meaning you might as well just use swap.
