I've had the PL-880 for about a week, purchased from Kaito, and it is by far my favorite portable. (And I've owned them all.) The 880 is what the Sangean 909x should/could have been if they'd spent as much time on the sound quality as they did on external design. The speaker/amplifier is really wonderful; deep, rich, yet no loss of detail. I find myself listening to SW, MW and even FM for...*gasp* ....actual pleasure... It made me step back and be aware of just how much ear-straining I was doing with my other radios, including the IC-R75 with external speaker...(Pirate listening notwithstanding;))
I feel the construction is slightly better than the PL-660, sensitivity seems about equal. The best thing is they've managed to increase verbal intelligibility on marginal signals for the most part. I like the nice stainless steel whip and the knobs are butter smooth. Echoing the above comments, SSB tuning is as easy as the ICOM, and for those times when the bandwidth filters don't completely eliminate adjacent channel interference, you can use USB or LSB with only a small penalty in fidelity, even on MW, something no other portable will do (that I know of).
I'm starting to appreciate the new 18650 lithium battery, though additional ones are kinda expensive (around $10). I was getting sick of all these double AAs proliferating around the house. The PL-880 is more like your laptop or smart phone--keep the battery inside, and charge while not in use. *Beware Chinese fakes on these batteries, and claims of 4000mah and up. From what I can tell, the good brands are Samsung and Panasonic and though I haven't ordered any extras as yet, it seems 3400mah is a realistic max. (The Tecsun supplied battery is 2000mah and seems to last a good solid 6+ hours at medium volume). I'd love to hear if anyone else knows a reputable yet inexpensive source for these batteries.
One small problem, the first shipment of these radios from Kaito had firmware with some bugs...(see SWLing blog for the gory details) --namely an overactive soft muting circuit that could not be disabled. Disastrous for SW with deep fading. It would actually *reduce* volume at the bottom of the fade...I hope whatever genius at Tecsun that let them out the door like that gets their just reward...
However, don't be discouraged as I heard a rumor that Kaito is going to be able to perform the firmware upgrade for the radios that have been returned for this defect, and I'd assume they'll be updating any new ones sold from this point forward. The ebay seller from Hong Kong (Anon Co) apparently got the updated model and hasn't suffered this issue.
In case you haven't noticed yet, I LOVE the PL-880. Does it have quirks? Yes. Will it replace the ICOM (or other communications grade receiver)? Of course not; but I do think it represents a step forward in modern portables that has been a long, long time in coming.