First up for testing... DVD's! So, pulling out and sticking in my Mummy DVD, my home theatre system was booming with the wonderful clear sounds of DVD, courtesy of the Kalua! I can say that it does take slightly longer than my other RCA DVD player to load the DVD, but that shouldn't be a big problem.

Well, what can I say? For those new to DVD, the clarity and cleanness will absolutely astonish you. For us "early adopters," I can simply say that the Kalua handles DVD's just as well as any other DVD player out there on the market. Period.

Before I move onto playing MP3's, I would just like to slip in quickly that regular audio CD's played perfectly, just as was expected out of any machine that has the feature these days.

So, we've heard about how the Kalua handles DVD's and CD's, so what about MP3's? I used my already-made CD-R full of 144 songs (just shows the benefits of MP3 on CD-R) on the Kalua because I couldn't wait for the MP3 test CD-R that I was burning to finish. I stuck in the CD-R and, after waiting for about 15-20 sec. for it to load up all the songs (this extended period of time isn't surprising, since both my portable players also take quite a long time to index all the MP3's from a CD), my home theatre was pumping with MP3-powered music! Very cool! The Kalua handled the MP3 files on the CD without a single skip or hitch.

Pressing the "Display" button on the remote brought up the display on my TV showing me which "track" it was playing and the playing times, etc. But I wanted to see the titles of the songs! So, after briefly checking the manual, I pressed the "Menu" button on the remote and, sure enough, it showed the titles of the songs. Here's where my only complaint about the Kalua comes in-actually, it's a 2-part complaint. See, the Kalua does not read the ID3 tags from the MP3 files; instead, it just displays the filename. Now, some of the MP3 files on there didn't really tell me what song was playing: for example, one of the files on there was simply named "song01.mp3."

The second part of my complaint is to do with how the Kalua displays these filenames. The TV screen is split into two columns when the Menu is displayed, so that there are two columns of filenames on the screen. The problem is that, because it displays everything in large enough text so that people sitting on the couch can see them, it can only display the first 10 or so characters of the file name. From experience, I know that most MP3 files out there have really long file names because they usually include the artist and song title. So, if you've got a bunch of songs by the same artist, for example, chances are that the Kalua will only be able to show you the artist's name (or even only a portion of that) and leave you guessing as to which song each of them actually are. This could get very annoying after a while.

While in the Menu, I took the opportunity to try navigating the directories. Using directories on an MP3 CD can be very helpful in organizing the many songs that you'll have on that CD. You can, for example, organize directories into artists or even albums just so that they'll be bunched together when you're playing them back. From reviewing only two MP3/CD players in the past, I've realized that each MP3 player out there handles directories differently. The Tavarua, for example, will play files in directories first and has a feature to navigate the directories manually, while the D-Link DMP-CD100 plays the directories last and has no feature to navigate them-my third review continues to follow this pattern.

The Kalua plays files that are in the root directory first and then places all files in directories after those. It also allows directory navigation so that users can pick which directories they wish to play from. Out of all the players that I've reviewed, the Kalua's is the best around in this area (probably because it has a whole TV screen to work with, compared to only a small alpha-numeric LCD screen with the other ones). When in the Menu, one can simply move around the entries using the arrow keys on the remote. Pressing "Enter" on the remote on a directory entry will take you down a level to that directory and, from there, you can continue to browse the directories and files in that directory using the arrow keys. Pressing "Enter" on a filename will simply play that file. As you can see, it's very easy to use and everything is displayed neatly in front of you on the TV screen.

On to: The Tests