Early birds: Cortana Mall announced today it will open at midnight on Black Friday to kick off the holiday shopping season. Macy’s and many in-line stores will be open for business at midnight, many with special sales and giveaways, the mall says. Other stores including JCPenney and Sears will open at 4 a.m., with all stores opening their doors by 6 a.m. Mall manager Percy Singleton says this is the first time the mall has opened at midnight for Black Friday. The mall will be open until 10 p.m. on Black Friday, with extended shopping hours throughout the rest of the holiday season.
A phone that slays vampires? After years of considering how best to enter the phone business, Facebook has tapped Taiwanese cellphone maker HTC to build a smartphone that has the social network integrated at the core of its being, The Wall Street Journal reports. Code-named “Buffy,” after the television vampire slayer, the phone is planned to run on a modified version of Android that Facebook has tweaked to deeply integrate its services, as well as to support HTML5 as a platform for applications, sources familiar with the project tell the newspaper. Read the full story here, and find out why c|net columnist Roger Cheng thinks it’s a bad idea here.
The biggest bite: Apple could very likely overtake HP as the leading global computer manufacturer in 2012, according to a new report by research firm Canalys. The findings illustrate just how much the computing landscape has changed with the advent of the iPad and the explosion of tablet sales over the past two years, according to an article in Forbes magazine. Apple moved into second place in the worldwide PC market in the third quarter, and global PC shipments are estimated to reach 415 million—a 15% increase from 2010—largely due to increased tablet sales. Canalys also estimates that fourth-quarter sales will be dominated by the iPad, though it notes the Nook Tablet and Kindle Fire will have a major impact as well. The iPad 3, due out next year, will help propel Apple into the No. 1 slot. Read the full story here.
