It wasn’t all that long ago that I spent $4,000 on a 43-inch plasma-screen television. It was a Panasonic with a beautiful picture. Problem is, the circuit board in it went bad after fewer than 18 months, causing a green band to stay on the screen constantly.

Needless to say, I wasn’t impressed. It was a lot of money to pay for a product that didn’t even make it two years. Nowadays, however, you can get big-screen HDTVs for a fraction of that price. Case in point: the Vizio VO320E TV, available for a little more than a tenth of that price.

It’s a little smaller screen, but the picture is better, with 720p HD resolution. This particular model is also eco-friendly, consuming less electricity than a normal HDTV, according to the company. It has all the inputs you’re likely to need, including component, composite, S-video, VGA and HDMI.

This is good news for those of you shopping for a new television; not so good news for those of us who shelled out four big ones for a plasma that kicked the bucket after less than two years.

I recently wrote about growing disenchantment with Apple and its products. Well, that unhappiness continues to grow, and the angst is moving beyond the iPhone to the iPod, other Apple products, and Apple’s way of doing business.

Take this recent blog entry from a former rabid fan, for instance. Jason Calacanis has just about had it with Steve Jobs and Co., and isn’t shy about listing his complaints. He says that Apple is displaying anti-competitive, monopolistic practices (does that sound like any technology company you’ve heard of — maybe one that was sued by the U.S. Department of Justice?), stifling innovation in MP3 players, banning other browsers and Google Voice from the iPhone, and other transgressions.

And he asks, with considerable justification, what would happen to Microsoft if it did similar things? Why does Apple get a pass? Because it’s a cool company? That’s not going to work much longer. Apple needs to change its business practices, and soon. If not, it could be facing legal troubles similar to its hated rival, Microsoft.

Recently, my family’s DVD remote went missing. This was bad news, as we like our movies. In another way, however, it worked out great, as it forced me to do something I’ve wanted to do for a long time: buy a universal remote. So I headed to several electronics stores, and ended up buying a Philips Universal remote, much like the SRU2103 shown here.

I’ve always liked Philips gadgets; they’re a good compromise between price and quality. This particular universal remote is another example of that balance.

I control three primary devices with it; my Sony widescreen HD television; my Panasonic DVD/VHS player; and my DirecTV satellite dish with TiVo. Setting up the remote was easy. The directions in the manual were simple and clear. I got the codes needed for each device (most popular brands have multiple codes, and you sometimes need to go through a long list to get to the right code for your particular model) within the first few options for each.

Most importantly, the remote works very well. I have no trouble controlling any of the devices with the remote, and it hasn’t given me any problems yet — not bad at all for a remote that sells for under $20. The only gripe I have is that I wish it had more TiVo functionality. Most of the functions I can do with one button press on my DirectTV remote, like recording and deleting, take two (and often, more) steps with the Philips remote. And backlighting would be nice, to be able to use it more easily in the dark.

Ultimately, however, those are minor quibbles. I could get a huge remote costing $100 or more and get all that functionality and more, but for the price, it’s a winner.

The Washington Post’s technology blog, Faster Forward, is reporting on some significant changes to its e-book Reader, including lower pricing for books and new models.

In terms of books, the price of the average book will drop a couple of bucks, from $11.99 to $9.99. As the blog points out, that makes it more competitive with the Kindle 2, Amazon’s e-book gadget.

The two new Reader editions are Pocket and Touch. The Pocket’s screen is slightly smaller than the Touch, at five inches, compared to the Touch’s six-inch screen. It can hold about 350 standard books, Sony says, and should give about two weeks of reading time on a single charge. It will also be priced well, at $199.

Its bigger, more expensive ($299) brother, the Touch, features (you might have guessed) a touch screen, with the ability to turn pages with a swipe of the finger. You can also write on the screen with a stylus, and even export notes and such.

The Sony eBook Store has more than a million public domain books available as free downloads, as well. It’s good to see this market starting to mature and expand.

The Kindle and Sony Reader gadgets have new competition: the iPhone, iPod Touch and BlackBerry smartphone, among others. That’s because ginormous bookseller Barnes & Noble has announced its own electronic book store.

The Barnes & Noble eBookstore is being touted by the company as the world’s largest electronic bookstore, with more than 700,000 titles available now, and more than a million within a year. In addition, about half a million public domain books are available for free from Google.

All that is good, but the better news is the number of available platforms you can use to read your tomes. The eBookstore is available for the three aforementioned devices, as well as other smartphones, and Mac and PC laptops and desktops. In fact, the company says that its application for the iPhone and Touch is the most popular book-related download in Apple’s App Store.

This should make things interesting for the Amazons and Sonys of the world. Having multiple ways to read books is a good thing; on the other hand, the uniqueness of the specialized readers is that they more closely simulate the experience of holding a book in your hand, which smartphones can’t match — at least not yet. Still, I know a new app I’m going to be downloading today for my iPhone…

We pretty much all love our iPhones, right? And now that I’ve had mine for about a year now (no, I didn’t sing Happy Birthday to my phone, in case you’re wondering), I thought it might be a good time to go over my favorite apps. If you’re like me, you have a lot of apps, but there are some you keep returning to again and again. Here’s my list.

Google for iPhone is at the top of my list. I use the voice search functionality often, and it’s a serious time (and typing) saver. I also have a gmail account (free Google e-mail). In addition, there is a calendar, Google Docs, an RSS reader, and more. My iPhone’s Swiss Army Knife.

AP Mobile is up next. I check the news often, and the AP is my primary source. This app has improved over time, allowing a lot of customization, local news, a technology category (you can imagine I spend some time there) and more.

Clock. This built-in app is one I bet many people overlook, but I’ve come to rely on the alarm clock functionality. I use it a lot since I’ve discovered it — one of the things I like best is that you can set different alarm sounds, the same way you can set ring tones. Instead of the hated buzzing of most alarm clocks, I have it set to graceful bells. It’s a nicer way to wake up.

Recorder. This is a voice-recording app that’s come in handy numerous times. In my day job as a magazine editor, I’ve used it time and again to record phone interviews. The digital clarity is quite good compared to my old, trusty (and revered) Radio Shack microcassette recorder, and since I have a 16GB iPhone, hard drive space to record conversations has never been an issue.

Fieldrunners. I have a number of games on my iPhone, but this is by far the one that has wasted the most of my time. It’s absolutely addicting. Fieldrunners is a tower defense game; you need to stop the baddies from getting through to your base by blocking their way through a series of towers. The towers can be filled with machine guns, missiles, electricity-generating machines, and more. I’m actually not much of a video/computer game guy, but this one keeps me coming back.

Well, there’s five iPhone faves. What are some of yours? Comment below.

George Orwell’s classic book 1984 is about a totalitarian society in which privacy doesn’t exist — “Big Brother” is the enduring image from the book.

Well, in the type of irony that you just can’t make up, Amazon.com just pulled a Big Brother-like maneuver when it deleted copies of 1984 and Animal Farm, another Orwell work, from owners of its Kindle e-book readers.

According to the New York Times, the books’ publisher changed its mind about releasing them in electronic format. So without warning or request, Amazon automatically deleted those books from all Kindle devices, and electronically refunded the money to every customer who bought a copy.

Sounds more than a little like something that would happen in 1984, doesn’t it? Scary, and a very, very bad move on Amazon’s part. If folks are spending $300 on an electronic book-reading device, then spending more to download books, it will create an awful lot of ill will from current customers, and will surely give potential future customers something to think about before writing a check (or clicking on PayPal).

Here’s hoping Amazon changes its mind. Are you listening, guys?

Amazon’s Kindle e-book reader is a really good product. The large screen, wireless network and print-like resolution make it a perfect gadget for those who want to combine old-fashioned reading with new-fangled technology that allows you to store multiple books, magazines and newspapers on a single device.

The Kindle has also done very well in the market, leading to the Kindle 2, released earlier this year.  The main downside to the Kindle, and Kindle 2, is the price.

Well, Amazon has done something about that, marking down the Kindle 2 to under $300.

The new price represents a $60 cut, especially significant in this economy. And the Kindle 2 includes some nice upgrades from the original. Some of the big ones include a better screen that displays text and images more clearly; more memory, for more documents; and a huge increase in the types of documents it can display, including PDF, HTML, TXT, JPEG, GIF, PNG and BMP, among others. What all those acronyms mean is that the Kindle 2 can handle all types of graphics and a wider range of text documents.

There are hundreds of thousands of free books available for the Kindle 2, and that number is increasing all the time. Add into that the fact that there’s no monthly subscription to pay, and the Kindle 2 looks like an even better value.

You know, it’s not a requirement to have a smartphone to play movies and music — I just thought I’d mention that, since there’s such a mad rush to buy those phones nowadays. But cheaper options do exist, and they can be much cheaper and offer quality that’s as good as, or better than, their smartphone counterparts.

Case in point: the Archos 605 media player. While it doesn’t have all the bells and whistles of an iPhone or Palm Pre for example, it does what it does very well, and with no monthly service contract. It’s not trying to be a phone: it knows what it is, and is comfortable with that. I like gadgets without an inferiority complex.

The Archos can be had for as little as $120.  For that you get a 4.3-inch TFT LCD screen with a resolution of 800×480. Compare that to the iPhone’s resolution of 480×320, and you can see that the Archos provides a better experience for viewing movies and videos.

The MP3 player plays all the standard music formats, and the Archos has a built-in external speaker. That helps if you don’t have headphones handy (although you probably don’t want to spend a lot of time listening to music or movies on that tiny speaker).

The Archos also includes wi-fi capability, and you can buy an Opera Web browser plug-in for the unit. That allows you to surf through the Archos portal for entertainment to download. One nice touch offered by the gadget is a fold-out kickstand, which allows you to sit the player upright for watching video. That’s a thoughtful addition, and something more media player manufacturers should do.

The Archos has been out for several years now, meaning it lacks that “Wow” factor that some folks just have to have. If you can live without that, and just need a good, basic media player, this may be your thing.

As I mentioned before, I’m not much of a computer gamer, except for one title: Microsoft Flight Simulator (FS).  I’m also a private pilot, and there’s one thing about FS that really bugs me; in a landing pattern, you have to push buttons to see around you. What I mean is that to look left, you push a button and see a left view out of the cockpit, and so on. In real-world flying, you look around without pushing buttons, and still have your hands on the throttle and yoke or stick. In FS, you’re pushing buttons to get a view, and it’s terribly distracting, at least for me.

That’s why my next FS-related purchase  will be NaturalPoint’s TrackIR. TrackIR is a device that grabs on to the top of your monitor and tracks your head movements. It then sends that information to the game (it can be any kind of flying or driving computer game). That means when you turn your head right, the game will follow your head movements to the right.

It’s kind of difficult to explain, so it might be best to watch a YouTube video of TrackIR in action to get a better sense of what I’m talking about. For me, this will revolutionize my flight-simming. Takeoffs and landings, in particular, will become much more realistic, and therefore help my real-world flying. Even if you only fly virtually, the TrackIR shouild be at the top of your list of gadgets to enhance your gaming.