I have gotten a chance to play a bit with mine, and as a receiver its very nice. The build quality is great, and now that I am used to how it operates I like it. I brought it on a Caribbean cruise last week and was able to pick up a few things that I couldn't up here. The FM reception was really nice, as I got to listen to Jamaican and Cayman radio while waiting for our ship to leave port.
Occasionally I can pick up canadian AM stations with the receiver, different ones than my DX-396 has. I didn't log them so now I forget exactly which, but I think they were in Ontario. Having SSB on a small radio like this is also handy.
There is also a trick to be able to scan frequencies outside of the bands. You have to manually input 29850 and then let it scan down (with the switch on the left side set to local stations) till it reaches between 0-100. Takes like 10-15 minutes I think. Then you store 0 in memory and you can scan up from that. Another usenet post says put in 29850 and let it scan up till it goes beyond 30,000 and store that.
You can search usenet for more details.