Help me internets...

[myz_lilith]

Hotel I'm due to arrive in London about 9.30pm Wednesday. However, with the country's tendency to grind to a complete standstill at the sight of the first few flakes of snow, and considering that we've now got several inches in Leeds and it's still coming down, I can see that being massively delayed. And seeing as how the plan was to stay with family, and that would involve a cross-London trek, and that would probably involve some major sacrifices to pagan gods if there's even a hint of snow within the M25 then booking a hotel is suddenly looking like a very sensible idea. So, can anybody recommend a cheap-ish not-too-horrible hotel/hostel near Kings Cross? Doesn't have to be anything fancy, just preferably no rats/cockroaches/chance of being murdered in my sleep.

Phone Am getting increasingly annoyed with the lack of internet on my phone, plus it's getting on a bit in general and things like the battery life aren't what they were. So thinking of buying a new one. Am torn between giving in and getting something fancy and app-filled and touchscreeny and shiny, and getting something for £30 so I can stay on my £10-a-month contract. As far as I can see, the shiny options seem to include iPhone, HTC and Blackberry, or whatever the Nokia equivalent is, because I've always had Nokias and get on with them. Any recommendations and/or horror stories about the fancy shiny phones? (Or even basic technical info and advice, seeing as how mine consists of mainly 'shiny' and fancy'?) Or anyone got a bottom-of-the-market phone that's actually fine for internet-type stuff and that they'd recommend, even if it's just as a stopgap?

Portfolio Have just found out we may actually get proper Flash training at work, complete with high profile live jobs including some funky character animations. This could be a huge boost to my portfolio, especially since so much of my exsiting work is print, and print (as everyone knows) is dead. I now don't know whether to get my latest portfolio sent out now, just so it's out there, or hold off for a couple of weeks to include the flash stuff. On the one hand, you can keep on playing 'ooh, I should just wait for that...' forever. On the other hand, there seem to be a lot more opportunities for electronic-type design out there than for print design, and first impressions count... so I don't want to get dismissed as just a print designer straight off, and then be fighting to claw back lost ground. Dilemma.

Comments

[vin_petrol]

Just one thing to consider with mobile phones. You wrote:

"Have just found out we may actually get proper Flash training at work"

If you ever fancy going "look, I made this!" and showing someone something you did in Flash on your mobile phone, an iPhone (with its complete and total refusal to ever, ever, run Flash no matter what) may not be the handset for you...

[myz-lilith.livejournal.com]

I'm kind of working on the assumption that flash is nearly as dead as print. So I'm more excited about getting to grips properly with the software as hopefully that will have some longevity to it... and even if the flash format gets killed off in the codec wars, the flash software will still be a functional way of building animations, whatever format it ends up exporting in. I think that makes sense?

Either way it ticks a box now - a bit like the way that people still ask for Quark when inDesign completely dominates the industry...

[john-the-hat.livejournal.com]

I've got an HTC Desire and been very happy with it. It's taking some getting used to since my pervious phone was prehistoric and its more of a quantum leap for me than an evolution from my old phone, but some of the apps are fantastic.

e.g. I've just got an app with senses the phones speed and if its more than xx mph diverts any incoming calls to voicemail and then sends a text message to the caller saying that I'm driving and will get back to them when I have finished my journey. Cool or what?

You can turn it off for the train, natch!

[john-the-hat.livejournal.com]

oh dear, spelling went a bit awry there, wasn't it..... trying to type and drink a cuppa at the same time...

[vin_petrol]

To write a slightly longer reply, I see a lot of phones in my line of work, as you can imagine ;-) It's hard to really say some are "good" and others "bad". There's so much variety you kinda need to make a list of what's _really_ important to you and work from that.

For example, I really, really like to have a 'real' keyboard on my handset, hence my choice of an HTC Touch Pro2. It runs the staggeringly unfashionable Windows Mobile OS, although with some HTC customisation on top which makes it somewhat less crap. It features the best 'real' keyboard I've ever used on any handset, ever! It's got five rows, which means numbers have their own keys so no shift is required to get to them. This is all very important to *me*, but could be utterly irrelevant to you.

The HTC Desire Mr Hat mentions is lovely. There's a recently updated version of that handset, the HTC Desire HD, available about now. In fact, HTC are doing such a good job of making nice handsets that Apple are suing them, so they must be doing something right :-) I'm a bit of an HTC fanboi - I'm on my fourth now, although the Touch Diamond I had for a while was a bit crap.

One thing I would say about touchscreens: BIG screens seem to make for a more 'comfortable' user experience. Everytime I use a touchscreen that's small it seems to mistake some of my gestures for other things (a definite problem with the Touch Diamond I mentioned above). The new Samsung Galaxy S has a huge screen (4.0 in 800×480 @ 233 ppi WVGA Super AMOLED) which is lovely.

Non-Apple handsets will almost certainly run Opera as a web browser, which has managed to carve itself a niche on mobile phones as a browser of choice. My phone also has "Internet Explorer" if I want to fall back to that.