ugh, sorry if i sound like a broken record but i played around with various versions of tear webkit again to see if i could figure the speed thing. whats confusing is that i could have sworn webkit was faster in older versions, but downgrading now seems to prove me wrong. but i noticed one thing, if webkit is downloading graphics from the net, its painfully slow vs just reloading the page from cache. this can be observed in tear by loading a page fully and then either hitting reload or the green icon. with reload its painfully slow (even microb seems to load graphics faster). but with the green (not sure what to call it) button, its a couple of seconds at most. still, im starting to think it may be a local issue, as im having some slowdowns with app manager and some odd reboots. could be the file system for the internal memory have gotten damaged or something. not sure if i want to do a full reflash of the tablet tho...