Playing with blender (UPDATE v2)

I've always looked at blender as a complex and hard to use tool, at least when compared with Art Of Illusion, however it is a very powerful and complete tool and since my trouble with using it is the lack of experience, I solve to give it a try and create a 3D model of one of my favorite cars, the VW Polo.

After 2 hours fighting with the keyboard shortcuts, cameras and lights, I managed to get a very nice model of the VW Polo overall shape done, I rendered it, and it looked quite nice... The metal of the car body was complete.

I saved and then quit, thinking in continue it later.

A few minutes later I though in render it and show it on the blog, so, I run blender, load recent file "VWPolo.blend", and.... only the first save was kept, so ... only the front of the car!
I tried the recover thing blend has... without success, I searched the entire hardrive for blender files ... nothing... It vanished.

This is what survived ... FML

I obviously give up of doing it on blender... or on anywhere else (this was actually the second attempt of doing the Polo, the first was on AoI... it crashed when I saved)... most likely my luck will strike again and delete it no mater what...

UPDATE:

After struggling into understanding what happened, I found out that after the first save, blender asks for file overwrite when saving... the way it does is by showing a dropdown menu... if you move the mouse out of the dropdown menu it disapears and file is not saved D:

Well, as a bonus I did a low poly version of the 3d model I attempted earlier:

Around 1000 triangles and a 512x512 UV mapped texture

This is my first attempt with textures on blender... pretty easy... but a labyrinth of menus is what it takes to do it.

Texture itself was mostly a side view photo and brushes on GIMP, not exactly the most refined one, but it serves as a nice test.

Perhaps I try M3G export and start doing JSR 184 enabled apps ...

UPDATE 2:

And I did...

Running on emulator

On my Nokia 5800 XpressMusic runs at 14~16 fps (if I run with fullscreen, without J2ME Commands, it will probably be less) .... hmmm ... maybe I should do some little game. Probably I won't...