Nextel and its proprietary Motorola phones pretty much has a lock on the "rugged phone" market, although the iDen network isn't generally much good for rural/wilderness use. Any rugged phone competitor needs to compete with Nextel, and in particular, with Direct Connect. I don't think that anyone can. I think every carrier except T-Mobile has tried to come up with their own push-to-talk solution but they all failed. Direct Connect works and works well so I don't think any rugged phone competitor will last long because buyers like construction or fleet operators won't want to lose Direct Connect, and the consumer market for rugged phones seems very slim.

Actually, someone remind me, what's going to happen to Direct Connect? Was Sprint slated to phase that out? Didn't Sprint sell that spectrum back to the FCC?

If you want one of these Casio phones, better get one now since I predict that it will disappear relatively soon. Too bad that it doesn't work with analog networks either.