Bieber fans watched the film and screamed with glee at the sight of him on the big screen, but many were also committing a crime. The crime was committed when they began taping the film for their own use. Since most of the audience consisted of teenage girls with their parents, I am left to wonder what parent lets their child commit a crime? Even scarier ,what kind of parent lets them do it in public?

Also I wonder how can Justin's fans call themselves true fans by stealing from the star?

I'm not exactly calling camera phones a fad, but I'm not exactly not calling them a fad, either. My bet is there will be a relatively small number of people who shoot lots of camphone pics--in the U.S., we have a special term for these people: "12- to 24-year-olds." A much larger group will have a camphone but never click the shutter; we call those people "adults."

I just think that, if God wanted telephones to be cameras, he wouldn't have given us separate eyes and ears.... I've found that the fun of the camera phone wears off quickly. The first few times one of these gizmos arrived at my house for review, I dutifully ran out and shot a bunch of pictures and sent them to friends. But the process was cumbersome, and the results not much better than the fuzzy pics my friend sent me. It wasn't too long before I stopped thinking of these phones as cameras.... the fact is that I just find them boring.

Barring one of those reality-warping incidents in which Superman gets exposed to the wrong kind of Kryptonite and then there's this huge flash of light and all of a sudden, there's a big statue of Don Ho where the Lincoln Memorial should be, camera phones never will be cool.

So: They take bad pictures, they're expensive to operate, they drain your batteries and in a worst-case scenario they'll cause your name to land on some sort of watch list. And yet more and more of them are manufactured every day. I'm baffled.

Look, somewhere here in the office I have a normal-looking digital wristwatch that also dispenses PEZ candy. After you've checked the time and determined that the Tokyo durable-goods market closes in just 20 minutes and thus it's time to start dumping some options from your company's pension fund, you push a little lever and a chalky cherry lozenge springs into your hand. It's stylish and fun.

I've never devoted a column to that one, either, because the PEZ watch had exactly the right sort of impact on the Industry. It's cool in a chocolate-and-peanut-butter sort of way, but it's certainly not the sort of thing that causes columnists and analysts to spend an hour leaning back in their chairs and speculating about where this technology will wind up in three years.

Which is a bloody shame, because on the whole, the PEZ watch is a much sounder investment than a camera phone. It's about as useful, for starters, plus it's a one-time $7.95 investment.