It may be large at 133.5mm (L) x 98mm(W) x 16mm(T) and weigh 359g but compare this to a laptop and you will see it’s not all bad.

Its large exterior is also used to good effect, as well as the 5" 640 x 480 hi-res screen there is a handy thumpad for navigation, a webrowser shortcut for accessing the Opera webbrowser, a start Button shortcut and an ok button.

To the right you can access your camera option, though this can be a pain to press and on the left you have a handy VGA-Out for connecting up to a larger screen, which will be great for those who do presentations.

The device also features a detachable keyboard which is attached via a super strong magnetic strip, that literally snaps into place and it's advised that you don't get any credit cards near this otherwise you can kiss them goodbye.

The keyboard itself will be a real bonus for those who need to have a qwerty keypad to type and yes the keys are responsive but the biggest downside is that you can't move the screen backwards or forwards with the keyboard attached and to be honest we ended up discarding it and using the stylus instead.

With the screen being 5" tall you can imagine that videos, games and webrowsing will look good and this is correct - you definitely won't be disappointed as this is exactly what it does well at. Its helped by the 8GB microdrive for storage and the 256MB Rom, 128Mb Ram and 624Mhz CPU and there is even an ATI chip stuck in for graphics, so in a nutshell the combination works well.

But we do have our reservations about the microdrive, when we tried to transfer only a 35Mb file form the microdrive to a miniSD card this seemed to take well over 20minutes and we have heard rumours of active sync sessions taking hours to complete.

HTC have also got another control system we nearly forgot to tell you about called VueFLO, it can be used in either IE or the Opera browser and essentially it monitors your movements, so if you tip the screen up the page scrolls up and if you tip the screen down it rolls down. This sounds great in theory but ends up being an annoyance and was turned off.

Moving on its spec continues with the introduction of a 20 Channel GPS receiver which is integrated within the unit, it took around 45seconds to pick up our position outside and this was helped further by the inclusion of a Quickfix GPRS utility which can speed up the process. Again the extra screen size does help with viewing directions and on the whole it does the job - there is also TomTom NAVIGATOR 6 software (Taster - 1 map) included to get you started.

Connectivity is covered to the max, you have Quad-Band GSM/Edge, 3G (UMTS/HSDPA), Dual Wifi support, Bluetooth 2.0 and push email support. Setting up any of the above was a doddle thanks to the communication manager.

Drawing breath for a few seconds the last major addition to the Advantages armour is the 3MP camera which features a built-in flash, shot time was quite slow at around 5 seconds due to the auto focus but images did look good, though it did have a problem taking images in bright outdoor conditions, mainly because you could not see the image on the screen properly due to the light.

There is also a front mounted camera which is designed for 3G video calls and you of course have the ability to make normal phone calls, but it does feels strange speaking into the device and we can't see people holding this to their ear or at arms length for very long due to its size and weight.

The Advantage is great for a business tool but it’s too bulky to be practical for anything else, as an MP3 player its like going down to the gym with a hi-fi strapped to your back, but for being placed on the desk it will give you entertainment whilst working.

HTC provide two music players with the PDA, the standard media player and HTC own version, plus you also have a 3.5” socket for headphones or you can attach wireless A2DP Bluetooth ones.

The Advantage also comes with a giant battery at 2300mAH which is definitely needed to power its hi-spec components, the battery gave us about 7.3 hours of use during our video playback test which is respectable indeed for a device of this nature, of course for connecting to Wifi or watching videos you can reduce this time accordingly.

Strangely the HTC Advantage does not come with WM6 but none the less an upgrade will probably be offered, besides HTC do provide you with a lot of useful utilities and software, including the standard Pocket Office suite, the QuickfixGPS utility, Adobe Acrobat to name but a few.

As you can guess a device with this spec is not going to come cheap and at £624 this makes it one of the most expensive products on the market, but you get what you pay for - though you could buy a Laptop for this price also.