I’ve had my iPod Nano for about a week now, and while I have babied it just about as much as my 14 month old daughter, after about day 3, I noticed many tiny scratches. I couldn’t figure out why as it was never near anything like keys, change, etc. It’s basically been in it’s arm strap, in my hand (for gloating mostly) or carefully placed onto my desk. So what’s with the scratches?

Well, I just came across an article at The Register that is reporting that this has become a very common problem. It reads:

People slavering to get Apple’s “impossibly small” iPod Nano into their sticky hands may want to pause a moment: those ahead of them in the queue have discovered that it’s also unbelievably easy to scratch the screen, nixing its photo-displaying abilities.

Trouble is that a few scratches will quickly make the colour screen all but useless for viewing album art and photos stored on the machine. In which case you might as well have bought the cheaper, screenless iPod shuffle, hmm?

Oh well … the price was good … $232 Canadian with Ed. Pricing for the 4GB model. It’s an impressive little unit, but I guess there had to be some catch. It’s liveable so far, but I certainly think that Apple has to deal with this at some point. I may have just purchased too soon.

Update: Looks like Todd Dailey has performed some fine polishing with Brasso on his Nano. This seems to restore the Nano back to “like-new” condition.