I get to see a lot of phones -- some good, some bad. The Motorola i880 from Nextel falls into both categories and, depending on your needs, it will be a phone you love or you hate.

The love part is easy. It's a durable, well laid-out piece of hardware. Picking it up the first time, you'll know it's a phone that will not bend with the stresses of your pocket or being on the bottom of a stack in your backpack or briefcase. You can tell that if you drop it, it won't smash to smithereens like many other phones. And it has lots of good buttons.

The i880 is a clamshell phone, so you can flip it open. It's a bit thicker than most, and has a feel like a walkie-talkie. I guess that's part of the allure -- as it has a walkie-talkie feature in it -- Nextel's Direct Connect. If that's important to you, it's another reason to like the product.

With the clamshell shut, you can turn on and off your speaker with a touch, and you have a button to reach your recent call, making it a snap to go back and forth with your favorite people -- even without taking advantage of the walkie-talkie feature.

Once you open the clamshell, the buttons are rubberized and light up. The numeric keypad is well laid out, with buttons big enough for cumbersome fingers, making it easy to dial, even in the dark.

But there is a dark side too -- starting with those buttons. There are just too many on the inside lower surface. Instead of using the [End Call] button as a power button, like most phones, Motorola has a separate power button. Instead of using the OK button as a menu, it has a separate menu button -- as well as a camera button on that same surface. You can get used to this arrangement; but there should be no reason to have to get used to it.

The thing that I dislike most about the phone is the way it sends and receives text messages. Instead of the almost instantaneous way that most phones do it, when you get a text message, the phone rings, then takes time -- sometimes a couple minutes -- to download the message. Similarly, when you're trying to send a text message, you have to wait until it goes out. On other phones, there might be a delay sending, but typically only a couple of seconds. On this phone, it could be a few or quite a few seconds.

The 2.0 Megapixel phone in the camera is competent. You can take photos in 7 resolutions, identified in the phone as Small, Medium, Large, XLarge, Max and two Wallpaper modes; and it has three zoom levels. My wife had trouble figuring out how to save her shots to the phone or to its onboard MicroSD card. So she would take a shot, then send it to our daughter's phone so our daughter could save it and print it.

The confusion was caused by the separate menu button that is on the left side of the face of the phone. The screen prompts show the menu in the middle. Unless you read the manual first (which very few people do -- at least not those I know), you have to figure out that it doesn't want you to press a soft-button near the bottom edge of the screen.

All-in-all, the Nextel Motorola i880 should be a good special purpose phone for business people or those in rugged environments, but strays too far to be considered a great consumer phone.