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Android can be built and configured to run on some very stingy hardware, like 800mhz single core SoCs. If this is a new SoC, it's probably at least that fast.

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Android's new floor is 512MB of RAM and that ain't happening in a $25 phone. Firefox OS will run on 128MB, fitting into an entire category of phones that modern versions of Android simply cannot.

Does this use the same code in standard firefox , or a different code base?

The underlying rendering engine (Gecko, FirefoxOS "Boots to Gecko" hence the codename is "B2G") is the same - all apps (including the Browser app on the phone) are written in HTML5/JS/CSS: https://wiki.mozilla.org/B2G

B2G is different than Desktop Firefox in some ways, for instance it uses multiple processes (this is being worked on for Desktop, it's already in use for plugins for instance) and supports some new APIs to access the hardware on the phone that you'd expect: https://wiki.mozilla.org/WebAPI

Gecko is shared. Everything else is different.

Android runs like crap on that hardware. Windows Phone 7 is the only OS which runs fine on that.

Android 4 perhaps, but I have an old Android 2.3 phone kicking around with that spec and runs just fine.

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