I have been a Telus Mike (similar to Nextel in the United States) customer for some time. I'm due for a handset upgrade and have decided to go with the Motorola i880.
There are three features about this phone that sold me. First, it's a flip phone. While this may not be novel to most cellular uses now, the last flip phone I owned was the Motorola StarTac, which was the first flip phone ever made. Ever since then, I've used candybar (aka brick) handsets. Second, it has a camera. The digital camera I use now for day-to-day photos (vacations, events, taking the license plate of a car that is driving recklessly) is small and portable, but only 1.2 MP and produces "internet-quality" photos of 1024x768 maximum resolution. This camera is integrated into something I'm likely to carry with me all the time (my phone) and is 2 MP. So, I'm actually getting two upgrades for the price of one.
Third, the phone is Bluetooth-enabled. I have never had a Bluetooth phone before and am rather excited at the potential for adding useful devices, like a wireless headset, or synchronizing with my laptop.
The last is one of the neater features, after you get used to Push-to-talk, TalkAround and the integrated GPS, which were in my last handset. If you look closely at the screen of the handset pictured above, you'll notice that it's playing the Global National podcast. This handset is MP3-compatible and accepts microSD cards as storage media. While I am quite partial to my iPod, carrying this around might be less burdensome on my walks to and from the faculty. This model differs from the i885 principally in the addition of "MP3 control buttons" on the front of the flip.
And one final snazzy feature: if you look closely at the above picture you'll notice a small silver button on the flip hinge at the right, just in line with the antenna. That button (optionally) unfolds the spring-loaded flip. That should save valuable thousandths of a calorie of energy :)
Actually, I lied, there is another snazzy feature worthy of a 'last but not least' notation. It supports what Motorola calls "Hearing Aid Compliance" that is supposed to reduce EMI and RFI for the purposes of reducing interference with nearby electronic devices. This has an upshot for anyone who uses an iDEN phone in their car: it will fix the 1990-analog-cell-phone-style interference with your car stereo, hi-fi, and laptop monitor. That's a feature you will want to enable as soon as you activate your handset. I have found the "Microphone" profile makes the most difference. I won't address the difference between Telecoil (aka. T-Coil) and microphone-based hearing aids.
Incidentally, the Telus Mike network relies on SIM card technology to identify its subscribers. I will be keeping my old phone and swapping the SIM from one to the other depending on my activity. Another useful feature of SIM-based phones.
Additional /5 July 2007/I noticed a wonderful Bluetooth headphone combo–the Lubix UBHS-NC1–but thought to check with Motorola before shelling out 85 $ USD for a set. I'm glad I did. I had noticed that I could not listen to music on my Motorola HS820 headset played from the integrated Music Player applet. It turns out that, to quote the very quick response from Motorola:
The problem in this situation is that the i880 does not support A2DP profiles. The i880 like all other iDEN phones cannot support the stereo headset feature for the phones mp3 player. I do apologize about the inconvenience, but the issue is with the phone, not your headset.
So, for all you iDEN (Mike/Nextel) phone users, we can't use great headphones with our great cell phones. Shame, it seems like that would be a no-brainer feature when one goes to the trouble of adding integrated music control buttons to a phone with Bluetooth.
