I’d suggest to keep trying to get help on their support forums. You’re not the first person to mention that they’re slow, but unfortunately that’s really the best place to receive assistance with this theme.
Unfortunately I don’t have access to this theme and have never used it before, since it’s a community theme. I’d suggest to keep requesting help in their support forums. If that doesn’t work – worst case scenario you can try to hire someone to make a few quick tweaks for you.
Here’s how to create a widget / sidebar area: http://my.studiopress.com/tutorials/register-widget-area/
Here’s some of the hooks: http://my.studiopress.com/docs/hook-reference/ – And here’s a link to a more detailed explanation of those hooks: http://my.studiopress.com/docs/hooks/
I hope that helps to get you rolling! If you need anything else just let me know.
Best bet would probably be to add in a widget area using a hook, and then create a custom sidebar for those pages. Should be fairly easy to do and give you total control over it.
As far as a plugin goes, I’m not sure I’ve seen anything exactly like that, but you can try something like this: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/related-items/
It starts in the div class iPhone. I’d just start looking through the files until you see <div class=”iphone”> and all of it’s contents should be that slider. There will be some coding in the functions file, CSS and probably JS that goes along with it, so be sure to take that as well.
I don’t know what “normal” consumption is, honestly. I’m pretty sure there are many things that effect that – more so than just the theme / plugins (although I’m sure they do play a large role). I’ll leave this to someone who knows a little more about the server-side of things than I do.
