Well... the browser's not anywhere near that bad, in my experience. It's not as fast as on a desktop, to be sure, but nowhere near as bad as it sounds. Most complaints of the browser being really atrocious turn out to be due to having "Fit to Width" turned on -- the implementation of this option's really not all that great. I've had occasion to use it a couple times on very lightweight sites and gotten good results, but mainly, it just makes pages ugly and horrifically slow. But I guess, from what you said, you had that on some of the time, and off some of the time, so I'm sure you saw the difference due to that.

I'm not familiar with the Dash's web browser, but it may be doing a lot more magic to fit the page neatly on a small screen, or even using a mobile version of the site; the N800's browser runs a config very similar to a desktop, intended to give desktop-like results, only smaller. You could try mobilizing proxies, but these do mangle pages in the process... (I haven't used any of them.) More stuff here, but I am only using Brontide's CSS, and flashblock.

You're best off going to full screen, leaving it at 80-120% zoom (I seldom use 120%, but some do; on a lot of sites, that can fit the main text column with no lateral scrolling, and get slightly bigger fonts.), and using "optical zoom" (move the tablet closer ) for any further magnification.

If you do need bigger fonts, but not zooming, that's possible either by changing the minimum font size (documented in the wiki) or another way (which IMHO is better): there's a global scale factor hiding somewhere to scale the reported 96 dpi before converting point sizes to pixels. Of course, I don't remember it, and am not sure where I saw it...