Be indulgent please :-?
Looks great 
Only thing is the shadows seem well not right, but thats just me
photo needs more light, you could increase reflection and try to match the same speculation and hardness the mug has because if you look at one. The picture is glued on/pasted and then the glaze is baked over that. And yea that light or whatever is illuminating the scene is a little close to the mug, it doesn’t look goo with a big shadow (as mentioned above).
Add one to relfection depth, make the walls and handle thicker, make the handle expand to merge with the cup closer to the cup, and then ittl be perfect. 
It looks great, although if you look at a real mug where the handle joins the main body it sort of folds (look at one and you’ll see what I mean) apart from that its fine
In addition to what has been said, the tiles are way too reflective. Play with that to tone it down.
Nice render though.
BgDM
Thank you all for your posts. I tried to correct my render based on your advices.
The one I had difficulties with and that I’m still not able to follow is to blend the handle with the body: I tried to make a good progression, I even Warped the vertices close to the body, but one can still see the transition between handle and body.
I also tried to follow the other comments and think it’s a lot better now.
Thanks again.
OldLink
If you really want the handle/body join to look good, youd probly have to make the whole thing out of one mesh and use subsurf.
Other then that, great work!
Looks great, maybe some work on the texture on the table?
OldLink,
This from reply I gave to a similiar posting:
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I like your image. Your use of environment mapping is good. I have a few suggestions that might add to the quality of your render. Nothing here is a must, or a law, but maybe you will find something you like below.
Maybe your cup model could be improved by attaching the handle, or I should say remodeling the cup with an attached handle. Take a look at this polygon modeling tutorial, for modeling a cup in Maya. I’ve used this tutorial to model cups in Wings 3D, but I have no doubt the same can be done in Blender quite easily.
You may also want adjust your lighting set up. Take a look at this page on Tweaking Light in the Blender.org User Documentation.
The entire ligthing section of the manual has good lighting setup information.
I like the sections on Global Illumination and faking area lighting. You might try setting up a GI dome and then using a soft shadow spot light as your key light for the cup. Try tinting your light also as light usually is not white. A light yellow works for indoors.
Since Blender 2.28c, the Radiosity engine has been much improved.
See JA-Forreal’s Radiosity thread on Blender.org. I think what he shows in his walkthrough there can be done with 2.28c. Someone jump in here and correct me if I’m wrong. So radiosity is an option vs. the GI method above.
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Your cup model is already very good. See if you can model a cup using the Maya tutorial above.
I can see you are using a current cvs build (vs. 2.28c). You now have the advantage of all the new features. Soft shadows and reflections are much easier to come by now. I’m finding, when using lamps, I like using raytraced lamps with settings of Samples: 8 Soft: 2. Tint your light, I’m becoming a big advocate of this. Try R 1.00 B 0.90 G 1.00. Also consider which direction your key light is coming from. You may want that light to cast a shadow and the others to have the shadow options disabled.
Radiosity is also an option. You can try lighting the scene with lamps, lamps and radiosity, or radiosity only. See the links above.
Lastly, think about the scale of the object in the scene. The cup appears much larger than the wall tiles. You have two options. Sacle the cup down, or make the tiles larger. If the tiles are a low resolution image, you will want to remake them, or use a different image altogether. I can relate to this because I always have a tough time with scale of objects in relation to each other.
Excuse any typos!
Good first attempts. Keep going.
Thanks for your advices EC2. I have re-modelled the handle using the technique you showed me, and it looks a lot better.
I have also increased the tiles size, and set up only one lamp to cast shadow.
This is the result. Thanks all to bring my render to this level so quickly !
Next time, I’ll post in “Work in progress” first 
No problem. Glad to help. Nice rework of the cup model. I’d still like to see you rework the tiles and soften the shadows.
Check out a stock photo site like Corbis or Getty for reference photos. Try searching for coffee mug, or coffee cup etc. These can help with ideas for light and shadow, as well as overall scene composition.
Keep going.
hey, it looks even better now! Although you probly don’t need to go to a stock photo website just to see a coffee mug, surely you have some at home?
Very true. I wasn’t thinking. But reference photos cannot hurt either. Funny stuff.
true. true