The Tavarua came in a very plain white box with some pictures of the player itself. Upon opening the box, I was greeted by a bright yellow piece of paper "WARNING!" in big letters at the top of the page and stating to:

• Remove Alkaline batteries before using the external AC adapter
• Always turn the unit OFF before removing it from power and
• Never touch the LASER lens

The last of the three statements is quite acceptable, but the first 2 were a big odd for a CD player. First of all, I've never had to remove alkaline batteries from any CD player that I've used in the past before using an AC adapter and I've never had to power off any CD player before removing it from power because it usually automatically turns itself off. Nevertheless, by keeping these three warnings in mind, I went ahead and took out the rest of the package.

Included in the box is the Tavarua MP3/CD player itself, a users manual, a mid-sized external AC adapter and a set of ear buds.

The manual, I believe, is a little too brief and doesn't spend much time to explain how to burn the CD's so that the player will organize your MP3 files the way you want it to (for example, I would like to know what it means when "files will be played in the order written to the disc," something that the user manual doesn't explain at all). It does, however, explain how to use the player and how to work each of the unique features on the player quite well, with very few words at that.

The ear buds included with the unit are quite, well, terrible, to say the least. They do give out some fair sound, but they don't even come close to the Panasonic ones that I had purchased quite a while back. Put simply, the bass is non-existent and the treble is weak.

So now, we finally reach the unit itself. The first thing that I noticed was how thick it is. I don't know how much more "stuff" Genica had to put into their Tavarua to add the ability to play MP3 files, but it sure seems like a lot when comparing the Tavarua to any other modern CD player. The gold color was quite stylish to me and the little buttons on the unit adds a bit of elegance to it. Unfortunately, the functionality aspect of these buttons is reduced because of how small they are as it became quite hard to hit them with my fingers. Two more gripes that I have about the Tavarua's buttons are that 1) the "previous track" button is actually labeled "Preview" (it doesn't even make any sense!) on the Tavarua instead of the usual "Previous" that I've grown used to seeing and 2) the "Next" and "Preview" buttons are backwards from each other. Usually, the "Next" button would be to the right of the "Previous" button, but Genica had placed it, oddly enough, to the left of their "Preview" button-very strange.

Another thing that struck me was what looked liked to be 2 headphone jacks, plus a line-out jack, along the side of the unit. I had often thought about how useful it would be if someone included 2 headphone jacks on a discman because of how there's always a large number of my friends who wants to listen to my discman at the same time using only the two ends of my ear buds. Unfortunately, upon closer inspection, I noticed that one of the jacks was actually for a microphone… yes, you heard right, you can plug in a microphone into this portable MP3/CD player. And yes, that was the same reaction that I got from myself when I found out about this feature. It turns out that you can actually use the Tavarua to record a quick audio sequence into its memory-the same memory that it uses for its 50-second Electronic Anti-Skip Protection feature (now mentioned as ESP, here forth). I was quite surprised that Genica had not used this unique feature to help promote the Tavarua.

On to: Powering Up...