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I picked the Holiday Inn in Brentwood, Essex — near the M25 motorway. Convenient for everyone to get to — does ‘ok’ food and it’s got all the basics — including the obligatory and stupidly priced ‘high speed’ ibahn WiFi internet. That I can put up with.

I paid £150 for the hire of the room to seat 8 people. Again, I can put up with that.

I asked for an LCD Projector so we could have a browse about online. I didn’t ask for the cost. £45 quid, I expected. Or a cheeky £55.

I was appalled when I found out that the projector hire was costed at £175 for the day. On the way out I asked the chap behind the desk if this was an accurate cost.

“Er, yeah,” he said, sheepishly.

I looked to the right of reception and saw the rack rate of an ‘executive’ Holiday Inn room. £179. Rack rate. Come on.

“I could have had a room for 24 hours here, for the cost of that projector hire?” I asked.

“Er, yeah….,” he replied again, hoping that I wouldn’t explode at him. He didn’t work in ‘conferences’, you see.

To be quite sure I wasn’t missing something, I had to point out that the LCD Projector cost MORE than the room hire.

Another sheepish nod.

At the same time I’ve had an email recently from Holiday Inn asking if I’d like to discuss preferential rates with them since I’m in danger of becoming a regular (I’ve booked three rooms with them in the last few months).

No, is the answer.

I’ll find somewhere else.

Alas we were stuck in a bedroom — the Rowan Room. Or the ‘Rowan Suite’. It’s a converted bedroom with a board table stuck it in. Round the corner from the main business section of the hotel. So the ibahn stupidly priced WiFi doesn’t actually work. And the air conditioning is rubbish so you have to keep the door open.

And the LCD Projector is one hundred and seventy-five pounds.

Once again instead of complaining to the poor chap on reception, I smiled brightly, thanked him for his time, typed in the pin number on my credit card and gave them £405 quid.

If you’re thinking of doing business with Holiday Inn, do ask about the LCD Projector cost. Learn from my mistake of assuming they wouldn’t take the mickey.

I’ll invest a bit more in Holiday Inn, I think. Using my executive powers here at Mobile Industry Review, I have decreed this post will be stuck in the ‘Annoying’ category on the frontpage of the site for a month.

Today’s ShoZu is one of mine. From an hour or so ago:

Yes! I awoke in glorious Billericay to find the place literally covered in snow.

Well, not quite.

We’ve got an inch, perhaps less.

So for all the Americans and Canadians reading — or anyone who lives in an actually SNOWY part of the world, let me deliver you a bit of morning entertainment.

You see, despite there being less than an inch of shitty powdery snow, most of the area is closed. Shut down. Schools will close, offices will shut temporarily, trains will be delayed. We simply can’t handle snow in the United Kingdom, especially not in the suburbs around London where 0.5 inches of snow is comparable to getting a 4ft drop in -10c (without wind chill) conditions in the middle of Tahoe.

We just can’t handle it. Folk are putting on their Wellington Boots as I speak and ‘braving’ the terrible conditions. So terrible that it’s actually reading 1.5c on the thermometer. That’s right, the snow will be gone in a few hours but you can count on the total disruption of the entire region.

Only a few moments ago a van was valiantly battling against the snow to drive up my road. You see those tracks? Those were made by that very van. Such a brave effort. He was slipping and sliding all over the shop in 2nd gear.

We don’t bother with 5th-gear snow-driving nonsense here. Heh. We just point the vehicles in the right direction in 1st gear (WHY ISN’T THE WHEEL GRIPPIN’????) and curse the ‘treacherous’ conditions.

If you’ve got any pictures uploaded to ShoZu of some DECENT snowy conditions outside, please email them in.

This is his very first upload to Flickr via ShoZu. His first. Ever.

And would you believe it was only 53 weeks ago? Just a smidgen over a year ago. Wow.

And what was his first upload?

A Christmas tree!

He snapped it with the now ubiquitous Nokia N95 — but didn’t have the geo-encoding live at that point.

You can find the original here and the Whatley’s full Flickr feed here.

He’s also got a photo map here thanks to ShoZu’s automatic geo-encoding of all his photo uploads.

And, as a bonus, read this How-To on ShoZu authored by the dude himself.

Here it is:

Now.

What handset do you reckon took that one?

N95.

Is the Nokia N95 one of the best mobile camera phones on the planet? I think so. You can see the original photo here.

This is another shot from the collection of MIR reader Mark Thomas. You’ve got a knack of capturing good lookin’ plants, Mark!

You can see Mark’s other submission last week here.

Andy uses ShoZu a lot to snap pictures, get’em up to Flickr, so that his kids can take a look to see what he’s been up to.

The photo below is from Andy’s flickr feed and shows a street in Ottawa. It was apparently -18 Celsius when he arrived on Monday — then the weather warmed up and promptly dumped a ton of snow:

That sort of thing is entirely foreign to us here in the United Kingdom. If we get more than an inch of snow, the country tends to shut down immediately, news teams rush to film stupid motorists who thought their Ford Ka’s would be perfectly fine driving up steep hills, and we all generally do a collective shudder and hope we’ve got enough breakfast cereal in the cupboard.

Goodness knows what we’d do if we were dumped a few feet of snow overnight.

I’ve got some more from Andy — including his first ever upload.

The Ottawa photo was taken with a Motorola Q9h — although that doesn’t get a description from Flickr and I don’t think it can use ShoZu’s geotagging functionality either.

Strange that it’s identified as a ‘Motorola Not Available’. I do think that’s a pretty good monicker for the Q9 series though — my Q9c from the States was more or less permanently unavailable. I’ve got a video to show you later.

Andy, thank you very much for sending this in – most appreciated!

Shazly’s first ever ShoZu upload was to Flickr and was geotagged to Dehlwala, Western Sri Lanka. Very cool indeed.

I suspect, but can’t confirm, that this is Shazly’s young one:

Nice one Shazly! You can see his best ever upload here.

And in case you’re wondering, Shazly’s handset of choice? Nokia N82.

Here it is:

You can see the original here.

That was, believe it or not, taken on a Nokia N95.

Wow.

Very impressive stuff Mark!

- – - – -

As part of the continuing MIR ShoZu Campaign, I’d like to publish your first, best or unique pictures that you’ve uploaded somewhere. Send me a link to Flickr (or the like) to ewan@mobileindustryreview.com.

Today we’re featuring reader Marino Bresciani’s cat:

An inspired picture, Marino!

If you can think of any LOLCAT phrases for this one, I’d be interested in hearing them.

I’m also hunting for more of the following:

* Your first ever ShoZu picture. What’s the first one you ever uploaded with ShoZu? You should be able to find it in your Flickr or various other gallery services. Send me it with your blog/site link.

* Your best ever picture uploaded by ShoZu.

Mail me on ewan@mobileindustryreview.com.

The only stipulations to qualify are:

- You took the photo with a camera phone
- You uploaded it over-the-air with ShoZu to an internet destination (e.g. Flickr, Moblog, Photobucket)

I’ve got an absolute ton that I plan to feature but if you’ve got a photo we should include, I’ll give that priority.

Today’s first ever ShoZu photo is of a shoe. My shoe:

This is highly uninteresting, I realise. Apart from the little timestamp. 28th of March, 2006 at 9:48am. Goodness knows what I was doing at this time taking a photo. And I can’t quite work out what the ground is I’m walking on. Or what the hell I’m actually doing. I might be sat down. I was most definitely testing out ShoZu to see if it worked.

Anyway, the point of this photo is that it’s my first-ever ShoZu uploaded photo. In 3 and a bit months, I will have been using ShoZu for 3 years. And that’s saying something in these ultra-fast connected times.

The phone I was using? A Sony Ericsson W550i. I couldn’t have told you that if I didn’t have Flickr’s meta data to tell me. I was *using* a Sony?

What was the absolute *FIRST* photo you uploaded with ShoZu? Mail it over and we’ll get it up!

Here’s hoping that T-Mobile have got their online systems working correctly and they don’t do a ‘Carphone Warehouse’ or an ‘o2′ and fall over dramatically.

In case you’re thinking of ordering, this is the link you need tomorrow from 9am.

And if you’d like a reminder about the device itself, here’s the Man From T-Mobile UK giving us an overview of the device on video:

At about 845am this morning I phoned Vodafone and asked them to activate Blackberry service on my main account.

I took my SIM out of my Nokia E90 and placed it into my Curve. Bish, bash, bosh… I was then live a few moments later.

I’ve been carrying tons of devices around and the Blackberry — temporarily, at least — integrates a few into one.

I say ‘temporarily’ because if I want to use any decent mobile applications, I’ll need to switch back to the E90.

Meantime, it’s rather cool only taking one device out with me…