I am not a habitual complainer and I do not write a lot of negative type reviews.  I only do so when a product has failed me under reasonable usage, or when I identify a design flaw that I think would effect performance.  In this case, I think I have found both, and although I don't dislike these pants and still wear them occasionally.  In the following review, to be fair, I will tell you my experience of what is good and bad about them so that you have more information to make your own decision.

I bought these pants from a adventure clothing catalogue retailer and had high hopes for them as a good travel pants because they were lightweight, easily packable, and did double duty as trousers and shorts/swim trunks.  They looked great (dressy enough for dining), and had lots of little features that I liked, like a semi-elastic waistband so that it can be worn without a belt, wrinkle shedding fabric with an SPF 30 rating, nice mellow colour that went with everything, the extra strong button instead of a snap, and a cool mesh pocket interior with little sub pockets (for change, keys, sunglasses?).  I loved these in shorts mode as I kept all of the pockets and features and they were really light and soft.  I sometimes used these as sleep shorts too.

But I also noticed some curious design choices, small things, like, a cargo pocket only on one side (huh?), and one rear hip pocket on the right side. Give me cargo pockets or don't give me cargo pockets, but why just give me one?  These pants WOULD be more difficult to hem for length (as someone else suggested) because they include an ankle zipper ostensibly useful for removing the trouser legs with shoes on or for just rolling up ones pant legs for wading.  However,  possibly for aesthetic reasons/unsightly zippers, they placed the zippers on the INSIDE side of the trouser legs instead of the outside, like normal.  This was baffling at first when trying to zip the trouser legs back on wondering how the zippers got reversed, hehe.  And if you do the crouch test, these pants do NOT have a crotch gusset and one gets an awkward riding up ones uh... crack... feeling from the center seam.  Maybe the sizing runs slightly small. I prefer a skosh more room in the seat is all I'm saying.

More importantly, after about three months of light wear and normal maintenance (washing and drying), I noticed that the nylon around the butt area was already wearing thin (like see through), and a split had developed near my front right pocket (where I normally keep my car keys).  As far as I can recall, I did not do anything especially rough with these trousers, mostly wore them around town, and they had the same type of use as other similar pants from different manufacturers (REI, Columbia, Northface, Mountain Hardware), yet these ExOfficios were the first ones to disintegrate on me.  Frankly I was both surprised and disappointed, and I had already worn them too much to even consider returning them.  I relegated this ripped pair to "painting" duty.

I respect the other reviewers differing opinions, and I sincerely hope other people have a better experience than I did with these pants, but I am taking a ($40) lesson from this episode and plan to avoid them in the future.