Amazon could hardly contain its excitement over how many Kindle devices it sold on Black Friday and Cyber Monday, the busiest offline and online (respectively) shopping days of the year. According to Amazon, the holiday weekend was the "best ever" for the Kindle family, especially Cyber Monday, which ranked as the biggest day ever for Kindle sales worldwide. It was pretty much the same situation last year, which makes it even more impressive that Amazon managed to double its holiday weekend sales record from 2011.

Let's be real, even the best smartphone cameras can't compete with some of the better point-and-shoot cameras out there, not in terms of overall feature-set and picture quality. Nor do they have to. The fact is, some smartphone cameras are very good, excellent even, though all they really have to be is 'good enough' to get casual photographers to forget all about their point-and-shoot cams, and that's exactly what's happening.

Imagine if you woke up tomorrow and every online store and brick-and-mortar retail shop was barred from selling Samsung Galaxy S III and Apple iPhone 5 devices. Do you turn to the Galaxy Note as well? That's barred too. In fact, you can't even buy a Jelly Bean device in this made-up scenario, because it infringes on Apple's patents. None of this has happened, mind you, but it could in a worst case scenario now that everything mentioned has been added to an ongoing lawsuit between Apple and Samsung.

Microsoft's hardware partners continue to take potshots at the company's Surface tablet. Last week, Acer warned Microsoft that delving into hardware is like "hard rice and "is not so easy to eat" (no joke, though something may have been lost in translation), and now HP is piling on the criticism, calling Surface a "slow" and "kludgey" solution. HP credited the press for hyping up a tablet that otherwise isn't very competitive.