Of course, your question about why you haven't seen Nano polishing services was primarily rhetorical, but it did get me thinking...

1. The owner of a damaged or even non-functioning nano may be upset, but is unlikely to have his life's activities seriously impacted by the fact. The owner of a poorly-functioning, or even badly scratched, TV will find that several hours of his day are degraded in terms of pleasure or activity options.

2. A TV is primarily a display-based experience (watching). A nano is primarily NOT a display-based experience (yet). Same goes for cell phones -- the primary function is still the phone call; not a display-based experience. You could, in theory, complete all your calls even if you could not see a thing on the display. Remember how phones looked when we were kids?

3. The nano owner is more likely to have the income level (as demonstrated by ownership of a luxury product) to support replacement over repair in the lifetime of the product. Display polishing is, of course, an attempt to stretch the lifespan of the TV as far as possible. A basic TV is easier to nurse along anyway, because it's got a lot fewer components than an iPod.

As more cell phones infiltrate the developing world, though, the conflict between short product life expectancies (manufacturing) and user expectations for appliance durability are bound to come into conflict. Will there be special hardware design for phones that will last 5-10 years (or more) under rugged conditions of heat, abuse, cold, sand, air pollution...?

I wonder: how severely can the viewing experience be degraded before the owner is compelled to have the display polished (expense, time, and inconvenience vs. overall user experience)?

> A nano is primarily NOT a display-based experience (yet). Same goes for cell phones

Agree with most of what you write, though many people who send/receive text messages or who take and view photos might not agree about primary use. Primary use with phone changes with context.

In various scouting sessions in second hand and repair markets in China/India/Mongolia the oldest workable mobile phones for sale were from the early 90s, though most handsets were probably 4 - 5 years old. From discussions with contacts I understand that many of these will already be on their second display.

OK, so let's see this from the context of device as a primarily display-based experience (whatever the device is). When that is the case, then for the user, the display IS the device essentially. Every other component is either a necessary interface, or clutter, or both (I'm taking the extreme case here).

When the display = the device, what does it say when the display is possibly the most vulnerable piece? Is the ultimate viewing device an unbreakable display with no other visible components? [And is that some of the appeal of the iPod, where everything but the display fades into itself, draws attention away from itself?]

(By the way, I take your point about messaging. But one could argue that messaging is only incidentally a viewing activity -- it's the communication that matters, not the displaying of the communication.)