madno2 is referring to the phong interpolation of normals, which is affected by crease angle, and has nothing to do with smoothing.

The smoothing boolen checkbox affects the smooth polygons feature, which is separate from phong interpolation.

Both of these features (polygon smoothing, polygon interpolation) are going to pay attention to crease angle. Since they are both influenced by crease angle, many people get them confused. They are two different things.

You cannot disable phong shading. You can control it with crease angle, or you can split edges - in the latter case no interpolation happens, ever.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phong_shading

Phong interpolation of normals is why the low-res sphere appears to be smooth, even though it is low res, and even though the perimeter appears to be not round. If you then enable polygon smoothing, then the perimeter will appear to be round as well.

Phong interpolation of normals is to polygon smoothing as bump mapping is to displacement mapping.

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