Petra enabled some of the compression and caching on the tomcat server and too great success.
Petra and my tests have been against a 3GS and Chris loaned us a 3G to do some testing. A little bit of pre-caching of some images and the site now flies along. As the data is not changing a great deal (it is historical after all) we can have a long cache time on and well it works. Don’t know why we didn’t think of it sooner (well I didn’t and Petra did)