Air on Android text input and performance issue (Nexus)

You probably want to use StageText. The fact that normal textfields run sometimes doesn't mean much; there's certain OS features it won't have available, even if it looks like it's working OK on a system or another. On an Android phone, those normally means not having auto-complete, copy/paste, etc.

Android 2.3-ish models might actually run something faster because typically those are lower end devices that actually have less pixels to fill. When you move into a higher-end device, despite having better hardware overall, the device (and Flash) has to do a lot more work to render content on the screen. Twice the pixel density (which is more or less the average when you compare old 2.x devices to newer 4.x devices) means 4 times the data to deal with. You have to take this into consideration. If you have complex content being rendered, you need to either plan on caching them as bitmaps or use GPU accelerated graphics (Stage3d/Starling, etc). You can get insane fill rates with those. Sometimes you should even cache them using a lower pixel density than what the screen allows, just because of the memory it takes. It's hard to say what's the problem without knowing specifics of what performance issues you're having, but I'd bet that's the case.