[Ruined]

Being a longtime owner of the A35 and now an owner of the BD30 I can give some perspective on how they compare.

So, lets start!

Video quality: Hi-Defintion
DMP-BD30: A
HD-A35: A
TIE! Both are awesome with Hi-Def discs.

Video quality: Standard Definition Upscaling
DMP-BD30: C+
HD-A35: B+
The nod goes to the HD-A35. It has far better upscaling than the DMP-BD30, tested with each unit set to 1080i and using the Reon for deinterlacing. The HD-A35's has great scaling but deinterlacing is not great so it lost some points there, while the scaling of the DMP-BD30 seems largely inferior though the deinterlacing is a bit better. Overall, the HD-A35 looks signficantly better.

Audio
DMP-BD30: C+
HD-A35: A-
The A35 gets the easy win here. It has builtin decoders for all nextgen codecs while the DMP-BD30 does not; therefore when watching PiP with the BD30 you can only do it with lossy audio. In addition, the DMP-BD30 has a bug where the LFE is attenuated -5db over HDMI when watching PCM soundtracks; this can be corrected by setting all channels to -5db - except sub, which is set to 0. Still, you should not have to do that. Roger Dressler of Dolby has confirmed the problem and Panasonic is working on it.

Offline interactivity
DMP-BD30: C+
HD-A35: B+
I'm not sure whether its the actual player or simply the state of BD-J, but the offline interactivity of the DMP-BD30 is like amateur hour compared to the HD-A35. Menus chug along, no cool scaling during scene selections, pausing/lagging when activating interactive content, etc. HD-A35 wins easily with its seamless transitions.

Online interactivity
DMP-BD30: F
HD-A35: B-
The A35 works good online however it has too little space to be truly useful. Also the network setup could be better. The DMP-BD30 fails because it cannot do online interactivity at all.

Functionality: Boot Up time
DMP-BD30: B
HD-A35: C
The DMP-BD30 starts a lot faster than the HD-A35.

Functionality: Time to insert disc until movie starts
DMP-BD30: B+
HD-A35: C
Again, the DMP-BD30 is significantly faster to get the movie playing.

Functionality: Responsiveness
DMP-BD30: B
HD-A35: C+
While the DMP-BD30 seems hampered by BD-J execution, it seems more responsive to user input than the HD-A35.

Functionality: Remote
DMP-BD30: A-
HD-A35: B-
I found the DMP-BD30's remote to have better layout than the HD-A35's and be more responsive as well.

Functionality: Front Panel Controls
DMP-BD30: B+
HD-A35: C
The DMP-BD30 has much nicer feeling front panel controls that are better positioned as well (especially the eject button).

Looks
DMP-BD30: B
HD-A35: A-
The HD-A35 looks a lot nicer than the BD30 in my opinion. Still the BD30 is no slouch in looks.

Overall, both are great players. IMO, the upcoming Panasonic DMP-BD50 may just trump the HD-A35 in all areas (except possibly upscaling). But I would recommend this player as well.