Maybe less smooth than CE kernel which is better at (hard) realtime than either Linux or iOS.

Implying that has anything to do with how smoothly it scrolls. WP scrolls smoothly because a lot of work was put into GPU acceleration of scrolling. App developers can still easily muck it up (by not virtualizing long lists, for example). Conversely, Android can also scroll quite smoothly if the developer puts the work into it. The difference is that WP makes it easier to achieve smooth scrolling in the normal usage case (not-too-long lists).

The latter is also more flexible with the various resolutions of computers, smart phones, and tablets. Flowable layout is a prudent choice nowadays.

Too bad a large majority of sites don't have flowable layouts. So many sites with narrow layouts (usually less than 1000px, because obviously 1024x768 maximized is the standard?), even narrower content areas (yay, 425px content columns!), using non-scalable units for text sizes and positioning.

Web page "designers" need to get over their magazine mentality and realize that the web is supposed to flow. And seriously, em math is no more difficult than pixel math, and often actually easier. If you want a nice, flowable, scalable, column of text that's not too wide for readability, make it 30ems wide. Now as the base em size changes, everything. just. works. Or use percentages (though nested percentages can get tricky). Either way, pixels for layout and font measurement must die.

I'm not too worried about that, it's more being constantly bothered to join, last thing i want is a phone which will start telling me that i need to join any particular thing. I don't mind the windows live id, because i already have a few to pick from. Thanks for the info though.

I've not seen any nagging. It's been a while since I've gone through OOBS but I think it just prompts you once ("Hey, you can add accounts!") and then never again.

Also, if you have multiple live IDs and you have one associated with an Xbox Live account, use that for the WP7 phone. You gamerscore and avatar will carry over to the phone, and any achievements you get from phone games will add to your Xbox gamerscore total. It's a nice little touch that makes phone gaming a little more interesting than, "I've got a minute to kill, may as well throw some birds at pigs."

You need a special TOKEN just to develop for the damn things? And there's a shortage? Do they have a basement full of MS trolls hand-crafting each token?

Not exactly, no. You can develop for the emulator for free (all the tools and SDKs are available for free). If you want to put what you developed on your phone itself you can either pay $100/year for access to the market (the standard approach that Microsoft wants you to do, because it gets apps in the market and everybody judges smartphone platforms by the size of their market) or you could pay the Chevron guys $9 and get the exact same level of access to your phone but not be allowed to submit apps to the market. The apps you write can only be used by other people who have paid for Chevron or are "official" developers. They call this "homebrew".

I don't know why Microsoft chose to limit the number of tokens for Chevron customers, but at least they're actively working with the homebrew enthusiast community rather than doing everything in their power to shut them down like Apple.

Since you have the phone and might be able to answer this, i don't use facebook, or any other social networking stuff, except form msn messenger, can that strong integration be removed or hidden, ie, if i don't use it, i don't want those tiles to show up nor options to be available to use the social networking?

I believe the only thing you have to have to use a Windows Phone 7 phone is a Windows Live ID (you can use any email to sign up for a Live ID, not just live.com/hotmail.com email addresses), which brings with it some small amount of social-ness (contacts, picture sharing) but of course you don't need to use any of that. the Live ID is only there for marketplace/Zune access. For all the rest, if you don't put in a Facebook account or Twitter account or whatever, it won't integrate with those services. It's not magic. It can't automatically sign you up for Facebook or find your unrelated Facebook account from the Live ID you gave it, so it can't make you accidentally the social networking if you don't want it to. And for the accounts you do add, you're given the ability to decide what pieces of data are pulled in from each (calendars, contacts, pictures, etc) For example, I have my phone setup with my Live ID that's associated with my Xbox, my gmail account, and my Facebook account. I have no interest in setting it up for Twitter, and so as far as I'm concerned I just don't put in a Twitter account and I never see Twitter tweets.

Updated for Windows Phone 7's People Hub

1) Don't link a Facebook account

WP7 allows you to add Live/Hotmail*, Google, Twitter, Facebook, and several other account types to the phone, all of which will get synchronized with the various hubs based on what accounts you have linked. For example, if you add a Live/Hotmail account, you'll see pictures and documents from Skydrive as well as any Messenger contacts. If you add a Facebook account, you'll see facebook contacts and updates in the People hub. For any account you don't add, you won't see information. Pretty simple.

* I'm not sure WP7 allows you to not have a Live ID account (which is not necessarily the same as a Live.com or Hotmail account, since those also come with Microsoft-hosted email but you can use any email address you want to create a Live ID -- I use my gmail address for my Live ID, for example). You definitely need a Live ID in order to use the marketplace, use integrated Xbox features, or have access to Zune content (also need a ZunePass account to stream music) and that functionality is pretty baked into the phone, so perhaps a Live ID is required.

Yeah, but no PC editor support mkvs, only mp4 (and no, mkvmerge being able to split an mkv is not editing)

Huh? That doesn't seem right. But even if that were the case, the beauty of MKV is that it is so easily muxable. Pull it apart, edit the component streams in whatever editor you like (any good editor should be able to handle individual component streams), put it back together. Tada! Edited MKV.

MKV is a container, and a relatively simple-to-mux one at that. The fault is not with MKV, but with video editors that spend time doing the hard work (editing H264 is not easy) and then skimping on the easy part.

Others have touched on your other points, so I wanted to address this:

Switch to a standard .mp4 container. Much better supported on hardware or software. Some day you will want to be able to stream from your server to a thin set-top box or load a file on your kid's phone. On that day .mkv will make you cry.

Plenty of thin set-top box clients play mkvs already. Devices from Western Digital (WD TV Live), Netgear, Seagate, Roku, Popcorn Hour, Boxee, and many others all support mkv out of the box, with header compression support, subtitles, chapters, multiple audio and video streams, and some even support 3D (not the new mk3d format yet, but SBS works) and will play subtitles correctly. Most mkv files contain MPEG2, h264, or VC-1 video and AC3 or DTS (or the newer Dolby TrueHD, DTS-HD, etc) and all of these players handle those just fine. Don't blame the container for being flexible enough to allow any random codec. Blame whatever crap source you stole your videos from for using a random codec. Those of us archiving our DVDs and Blu-Rays will either encode in H264 or remux the original MPEG2/H264/VC-1 streams untouched and have no problems.

If you want to move videos to a phone, that's easy enough to do. The beauty of being a completely open container format means that it's trivial to demux Matroska containers into their component streams, which than then be remuxed into mp4 for devices that suck. Since you'll probably want to down-res the videos anyway for handheld formats (even on tablets you won't want higher than 720p), there's no reason to keep the originals in mp4. Keep your original, untouched videos in mkv and re-encode at lower resolution and bitrates into mp4 using Handrake for mobile devices.

Divx (yeah, whatever, they're still relevant) has adopted MKV as their HD container format, and the proliferation of "networked media tank" devices plus Matroska's openness makes it not only relevant but desirable for long-term video storage. Using 5+ year old devices like Xbox 360 and PS3 as your benchmark for what containers to use would be a bad idea (Xbox still doesn't even support 6-channel AAC in mp4, never mind supporting AC3).

I know other browsers render it centered, but that's not the (only) point

The site's punishing you for using an ad blocker. I just tested Chrome with adblock, Chrome without adblock, Aurora with adblock, Aurora without adblock, IE9, Opera 11, Safari 5 with adblock, and Safari without adblock. In every case, when adblock was turned off (or not available), the page rendered correctly*. When adlbock was turned on, it rendered like a steaming pile of shit.

The remainder of your points are completely valid. Fixed-width, fixed-font size, ad-spattered, split-for-the-sake-of-page-views "design" doesn't really inspire confidence about their ability to validate usability testing. At least they don't have an always-on-top floating toolbar like so many other sites are doing. But I probably shouldn't be giving them any ideas ...

* It's worth noting that the page is still a steaming pile of shit when rendered "correctly". The only difference is that it's centered.

Could this hack be used to protect your ebook purchases so they can't be revoked after the fact 1984 style?

You don't need a jailbreak for that. You just need to remove DRM on the books you purchase. This is easy to do (hint: Apprentice Alf is your friend, and Google knows about him ...), and combined with a tool like Calibre you don't have to worry about losing any of your ebooks ever again.