Retailer Best Buy took Black Friday orders that it could not fulfill, waiting until days before Christmas to cancel them [NYT]

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Best Bait

Cameras, GPS, and always-on internet connections come with our cellphones, putting the all-seeing eye always within reach. Everyone is watching, not just Big Brother. So you’d better behave yourself. To a group of delayed travelers, a man who assaults an accused fare-dodger on public transport might be a hero. But the cold light of YouTube offers a different perspective . [TNW]

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Smartphones, the record of everything

AT&T drops its attempt to buy the United States’ other major GSM carrier. [All Things D]

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AT&T drops T-Mobile bid

Vlad Savov reviews the Xoom 2 , Motorola’s latest Android tablet. He recommends waiting until Android 4 is out: “[the] good things are for naught if the software isn’t good enough and, regrettably, that’s exactly where the Xoom 2 finds itself.” [The Verge]

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Motorola Xoom 2

Telemarketers may soon be permitted to call cellphones at the owner’s expense . Here’s a campaign to throttle the legislation in committee . [Credo Action]

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New law would let telemarketers call your cellphone

RIM’s attempts to stop people rooting their PlayBooks are failing . But it will keep trying! Because sunk costs aren’t just about money, you know!

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RIM kills PlayBook root hack; hacker roots it again

Gizmodo lists the worst gadget gifts this holiday season. Do not buy cheap cameras or Android tablets, the iPod Touch, “4G” cellphones, or anything with the phrase “Beats by Dre” on it. To these choices I add portable hard drives (prices are high), the iPad (good chance of a major upgrade soon), and “desktop replacement” laptops.

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Horrible gifts for gadget fans

In the New York Times , Ian Austen and Susanne Craig report that two executives of RIM were “intoxicated” and unruly on a Toronto-to-Beijing flight, forcing a stop-off in Vancouver to get rid of them.

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Tired and emotional RIM executives force plane to land

Espen sez, “Yesterday, the Norwegian book industry introduced a scheme where they would sell electronic books on little plastic cards, to be inserted in proprietary readers - an astonishingly stupid idea even by their standards. Here is my riff on that idea - and a solution to the ‘books as status signals’ conundrum.”

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Norway’s world-beating ebook stupidity

Glenn Fleishman reviews the Kindle Fire for The Economist : “The Fire is not an iPad killer. But nor does it need to be. ”

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Kindle Fire reviewed