I've now played a bit with transitioncontrol. I have to say that I generally find the visual effects in Maemo 5 to be excellent. They really enhance the look and feel of the OS without usually getting in your way, slowing you down or being tacky.

There are a few exception of course and that's where transitioncontrol comes in handy:

- Rotate In and Rotate Out: set both to 0 to disable the flip animation that plays when the screen orientation switches from landscape to portrait. This makes the orientation switch not pretty but significantly faster than the sluggish default.

- App Open: set to 0 to disable the zoom in effect that plays when an application launches. Then launch any application from a desktop shortcut (Phone, Contact, Conversation or Calculator would be good examples) and see how it now appears instantly. There is no magic here though - the vast majority of applications, even if they appear instantly, will still need a few seconds to initialize themselves. The benefit of this tweak in real life is therefore probably close to null.

These are the only tweaks I saw that could potentially makes the N900 faster. There are other tweaks that you can make but, in fairness, it's likely that in most cases the performance bottleneck lies in either the applications or in your brain more than in the animations. Here are a few tweaks you might want to try though:

- Subview In and Subview Out: set to 10 to make screen transitions within an application much faster (test with Email or Media Player). Set to 0 to disable the sliding animation altogether.

- Task Zoom: set to 15 to make the task manager's zoom in / zoom out animations play faster. Any value less than that will make the animations too jerky. Set to 0 to disable the animations altogether.

- Launcher In, Launcher Out, Launcher Sub In, Launcher Sub Out: set to 15 to make the fade in / fade out animations in the main menu play faster. Lower values work too but might cause some animations to be skipped altogether.