There was a telling bit of news on the continued travails of the U.S. consumer today from a small Texas retail chain called Conn’s (CONN). (In general, I would say calling a retailer “Conn’s” is not something I would recommend. But I digress.)

Conn’s sells consumer electronics, home appliances, furniture, mattresses, computers and lawn and garden products in 75 stores in Texas, Louisiana and Oklahoma. And according to a statement from the company this morning, this is not an ideal time to be in that particular line of business.

“Economic conditions in the company’s markets have deteriorated significantly during the current year,” the company warned, citing a rise in the Texas jobless rate to 8 percent in August 2009 from 5.6 percent in December and 5 percent in August 2008. “As a result, the Company’s sales and credit portfolio performance have been adversely impacted.”

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South Korea’s LG Display Co. said its third-quarter net profit nearly doubled from a year earlier, thanks to a steady rise in prices for flat-panel screens.

Big producers of liquid-crystal displays, including LG Display, are currently reaping the benefits of higher prices. Prices have gotten a lift lately because of reduced production and robust demand from China, where a government stimulus package is pushing consumers in rural areas to purchase consumer electronics. A shortage of glass used to make LCD panels also contributed to the tightness of the panel market during the third quarter, further boosting prices and profits.

LG Display, one of the world’s largest makers of LCDs, said it expects its fourth-quarter shipments of liquid-crystal displays to rise by a high single-digit percentage from the third quarter, while it expects average selling prices to show a “gradual” decline from the third quarter.

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Nintendo’s Wii has outsold rival game consoles. Now a new study says it also outlasts them.

The study by SquareTrade, an independent provider of warranties on electronics, estimates that 2.7 percent of Wiis fail during the first two years of ownership, compared with a 10 percent failure rate over that period for Sony’s (SNE) PlayStation 3 and a 23.7 percent failure rate for Microsoft’s (MSFT) Xbox 360. The Wii failure rate is not just low for a game console, but for any kind of consumer electronics, the SquareTrade study says.

The company said it came up with the results after studying failure reports for 16,000 game consoles purchased by SquareTrade customers.

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Cell phones and laptops may seem like pretty minor offenders when it comes to energy guzzling. But as they become ubiquitous all over the planet, their growing power consumption is emerging as a major source of concern for those trying to conserve energy and stop global warming.

Communication gadgets and other consumer electronics burn up 15 percent of all the electricity consumed in households around the world, according to a new report from the International Energy Agency. If the use of electronics continues to spread at the current pace, their energy draw could double by 2022 and triple by 2030. At that point, they would absorb as much electricity as all houses in the U.S. and Japan today.

But are electric gadgets vampires or saviors? Telecommuters who would otherwise burn gasoline to get to work, or drivers who get to their destination quicker by using a GPS device are actually saving energy, argues the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy.

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Just how much power TVs should use has become a matter of growing debate between the California Energy Commission and the consumer electronics industry.

Next week, the Consumer Electronics Association is coming out with a new study in a salvo against the CEC over proposed rules for specific energy standards for TVs sold in California. Under the CEC’s proposed rules, 42-inch TVs sold in California must consume 183 watts or less by 2011, dropping to 115.5 watts by 2013. The CEC says it’s trying to make TVs more efficient to save the state and consumers money.

But the CEA’s new study, which the industry group commissioned earlier this year from consulting services firm Resolution Economics LLC in Los Angeles, tries to debunk some of the CEC’s reasoning for the new rules.

Doug Johnson, the CEA’s senior director of technology policy and international affairs, says consumers won’t save any money under the proposed rules and will end up paying more for TVs if the rules go into effect. The study notes that TV makers currently charge more for TVs that currently meet the government’s Energy Star standard, which is given to those products that meet strict energy efficient guidelines set by the Environmental Protection Agency and the U.S. Department of Energy.

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In a report combining consumer electronics, semiconductors, and infrastructure software analysis, Pacific Crest Securities equity researchers today write that Microsoft’s (MSFT) forthcoming Windows 7 is “a dramatic improvement over Vista” and that it has “implications for the technology sector” beyond just what it will do for Microsoft. The operating system, which is currently in beta and is rumored to be approaching production release much faster than usual for Microsoft’s OSes, “could be out by the end of June,” which would make the software a material contributor to Microsoft’s fiscal 2010 results, write the authors.

The Pacific Crest test labs have found that in putting the beta of Win 7 through its paces, “the increased speed and stability, relative to previous Windows iterations, are striking […] Everything seems to run faster and more smoothly […] the primary test laptop has not crashed since installation of Windows 7 two weeks ago.”

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Reed Hastings is prowling CES for deals. Already, in the past year, the CEO of DVD rental service Netflix Inc. has cut at least a half-dozen partnerships with consumer electronics makers to make a Netflix service that streams movies and television shows over the Internet watchable on television sets via game consoles, digital video recorders and other gadgets.

This week at CES, Netflix announced Korea’s LG Electronics will let viewers tune into the Netflix service through an upcoming line of HDTVs. A Netflix deal also announced this week with another television maker, Vizio, could be even more interesting because some of those sets will be able to get onto the Internet wirelessly, a technology that will make it much easier to get online than sets with only wired Internet connections.

“I think it will double or triple the percentage of people who have those devices and hook them up to the Internet,” Hastings said, over a cup of gelato at a café in the Venetian hotel.

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Cisco (CSCO) has decided to be a player in the consumer electronics business.

Cisco is a company that tends to be associated with enterprise networking; at its heart it remains a manufacturer of big honking routers. But over the last few years, the company has made a concerted effort to get into the consumer business, largely through its acquisitions of Linksys, which makes home networking gear, and Scientific Atlanta, manufacturer of cable set-top boxes.

At the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas today, Cisco made a set of announcements that extend its consumer ambitions considerably.

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In a mixed holiday sales forecast, an electronics industry trade group is projecting that consumer spending on such gadgets will grow 3.5 percent in the fourth quarter, half the growth rate in the same quarter a year earlier.

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Best Buy (BBY) has a nice niche with its Geek Squad, providing tech-savvy service people to help customers set up large-screen televisions, home theater systems, wireless networks and other high-end consumer electronics goods. It’s such a nice niche, in fact, that now everyone wants to do it.

Citigroup analyst Kate McShane raised the issue this morning in launching coverage of the electronics retailing giant. She rates Best Buy a “Hold,” and specifically focuses on the the rise of Geek Squad clones. That would be good news for geeks, not so good for Best Buy.

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