I bought one from China instead.  The one I got came in a sniper-rifle-looking box in about as many pieces.  I'm no luthier, but I've played cello for 27 years and know my way around a sawbox and I'm not shy with a mouse sander.  This was my first "factory fresh" axe.  

First time I assembled it I knew I had some work to do before it was playable.  I've disassembled it and reassembled it twice now.  I had to sand the bridge down quite a bit.  I also had to sand the finish off the peg shafts and rozen them up twice before they would hold a tune.  So far nothing unexpected or out of the ordinary.

As for the unexpected: the scroll box is too shallow.  The D and G strings wrap tight over the A peg.  I have to juggle all three strings when I'm tuning it or I get none of the above.  A machine head would fix this but I'm not sure a standard $100 brass rig set would fit.

As for the out-of-the-ordinary: the body is carved out of ONE solid piece of maple, scroll-to-end pin!  The only glued seam on the instrument is the ebony fingerboard to the neck.  It's a cool idea, but woe be it to me if the body ever cracks.

Speaking of cracks, the shape of the thing is like trying to saw on a two-by-four.  There's really no place to get a knee grip on the body without rosining-up your kneecaps.  The shoulder is also half-depth, so it really doesn't sit on your sternum in a playable position.  I finally figured out how to sit diagonal on a chair with a square seat pan and hook the cello on the spare corner to hold it.  I also need a solid end-pin board.  A normal rock stop just kicks out from the lever torque holding it like that.

Message to all you beginning cellists out there looking for something to learn on: buy the Yamaha.  This one's shape is too far off to teach you good celling habits.

Shape-wise the body is too long and unbalanced to try to play on your knee like a guitar.  Message to all you electric guitarists out there looking for something more exotic: forget it.  This thing can only be played in the upright seated position.   

You can't even put this thing down.  The body's too thin to stand up on its side like a normal cello, and resting on the back puts it on the jacks where it shouldn't be.  I've been leaning it upright in the corner so far, but I've broken bridges doing that to other cellos and I really need to rig a stand for it.

One more cheap part: the tailpiece is metal with integrated slide-style fine tuners.  The tailpiece already rattles on low G and C.  I'm definately going to go get me an ebony tailpiece and swap in some real L-style fine tuners.  These slot-style fine tuners are all but useless.

Ok, that's it my review of the thing as a cellist.  Lets begin the review of my electric cello from a mechatronics engineer:

Electronics-wise, the piezo-electric pickup strip is seated in a routed-out box on the face so you really can't misalign the thing.  It gets great gain under there, FAR better than any clip-on bridge mic I've tried.  But the rest of the pre-amp electronics are pretty cheap.  First day out of the box it already has a loose open circuit problem in the line-out jack AND the headphone jack.  I'll see about opening up the plastic cover on the electronics bay and having a go at rewiring in some heavier jack ports.  The Yamaha's ports were metal where this one's are plastic, but that's only about a $100 parts upgrade, not worth the $1000 price difference.

Message to all you cellists out there looking to go electric: skip the cheesy bridge mics and go for a body-less all-electric.  Cheap mics sound like...um...cheap mics.  They pick up all the ambient background noise anywhere near your cello.  Piezo-electric under-bridge pickups on a body-less cello sound like the real electric cello deal and thus far pretty much ignore all ambient noise (zip for feedback too, even when I'm right next to the amp).  The Yamaha and mine have pretty much the same mind-altering voice.  That's the thing worth buying a whole new instrument for.  Don't waste your $10 on the bridge clip-on mic.  Its not even close.

Lets talk amps.  This is the thing I wasn't expecting.  Turns out the instrument itself is only half of the actual instrument.  The other half is deciding which amp to pair with it.  I spent a whole evening jacking my cello into twenty different amps down at Guitar Center, and got 50 different sounds out of it: everything from what I'd call "ultra-clean bowed concert grand piano" to "fingernails on the feedback scrape".  Yeah, I blew minds down at the store that night: "electric WHAT?"

As for me I say "if I wanted perfect acoustic clean: I actually own the real thing: an accoustic cello!  I bought the electric to do Metalica covers, gimmie the overdrive with extra afterburner!  Where's my Eleven!?!"

Um....lacking the $13,500 for the above mentioned "crowdpleaser" amp, I settled on borrowing my friends Fender R-25 guitar amp (about $137 worth) and it sounds scrapy enough to blow a few minds and annoy the neighbors.  Beyond that I figured out how to hotwire the thing through my Mac's Garage Band software and get most of the expensive amp sounds for cheap if I'm willing to put up with a 2-second processing lag.

Let's finish this with a chat about playability.  It isn't.  Its hard to hold let alone play and the pickups are unbelievably unforgiving.  Every little scritch and squawk your accoustic cello used to igore--the pickups broadcast to the whole world in living fingernails-on-chalkboard.  I've played accoustic cello for nearly 30 years now but picking up this electric feels like day one all over again.  It must be played flawlessly clean or your going to hate it.  Learn to play cello from scratch on an electric? God help you.  It would be hell to play if I didn't already know where all the notes are, how to vibrato, and have some very good bow control.  Even from there its starting over again on a whole new learning curve.

That said--its a total blast to play.  Imagine a 4-string bowed fretless electric guitar. That's pretty much what I've got now.  Sounds sleepy until you realize a bow can bounce tremelo faster than you could possibly pick a guitar string.

Rock on.