Here's a nice, sharp break from the cheerleading and punch-pulling for which Wall Street analysts are notorious: A financier on Garmin's last quarterly call, cussing out company for shitty margins on a product.

RBC Capital is a Canadian bank whose research analysts are still on the job, unlike half of Wall Street's. Too bad they're not able to crunch some happier numbers: RBC downgraded Alcatel-Lucent, Nortel, Garmin, Symmetricom, DSP Group and Ericsson this morning. Thirty-word version from analyst Mark Sue:

Market research firm NPD Group tells AdAge that Garmin and TomTom will have a very merry Christmas this year. GPS device unit sales are up 488 percent, with revenues rising 214 percent. Translation: GPS units have hit that sweet spot where dropping prices cause sales to explode. Spending on electronics as a whole is down 0.5 percent from last year's numbers. Other hot items include digital picture frames, LCD TVs, and digital SLR cameras. So now you know what to put under the tree if you plan on being a completely predictable trend-follower! (Photo by Jimmy Joe)

TomTom, the GPS device maker, has raised its offer for digital mapping service Tele Atlas to $4.22 billion. This is a substantial rise over rival Garmin's prior bid of $3.3 billion. That offer topped a prior one by TomTom for $2.5 billion. The market thinks the purchase price will be driven higher as Tele Atlas's stock price is trading higher than even the latest offer. TomTom has purchased a 28.3 percent stake in Tele Atlas already on the public market. Garmin owns a little over 5 percent of the company.

GPS device maker Garmin has offered $3.3 billion for digital mapping service Tele Atlas. Rival TomTom offered $2.5 billion for Tele Atlas in an earlier bid. Currently, Garmin uses maps from Navteq. After that company was acquired by Nokia, Garmin started looking for other options. With $1 billion in cash, Garmin would finance the acquisition through cash and loans from several banks. What's this all mean? With Navteq off the market, expect something of a bidding war for Tele Atlas between Garmin and TomTom — and maybe Google. Garmin has an advantage here, though — it already purchased 5 percent of Tele Atlas on the open market. Shares in Garmin fell 11 percent after the bid was announced as investors worried that the purchase price could rise significantly. (Photo by AP/Reed Hoffmann)