Assuming you got the video, it should show you the speed -- now that's over some pretty good cable, in the same town as my office computer (which is what I was accessing) with pretty good bandwidth there, too. It's over the internet, but not horribly much of it.

I don't find the speed to be a problem -- I haven't gotten to tunneling RDP through an EDGE link, but VNC is just barely useful that way.

As for the screen, yes, I'm running portrait mode. In matchbox, you can rotate without much trouble -- FVWM has a bit more trouble, as it remembers where the edges of the screen were, but I'm set up to easily swap between the two, and FVWM does fine if you stay in the one you started it in.

As for the config, most of it is straight from iiiedokeiii's stuff, with some changes to accommodate my rxvt and xvkbd builds, IIRC.