In my quest for the best Office 2.0 mobile device, I recently came across the upcoming HTC Advantage. It’s a funny little device that is slightly larger than a smartphone or a PDA, but smaller and lighter than the Sony VAIO UX180P or the OQO Model 01+ we reviewed in past articles.

The device sports a very large and bright VGA display, and packs an 8GB hard drive, a miniSD port, a 3 mega-pixel camera, a GPS receiver (with TomTom NAVIGATOR 6), and a battery worth 8 hours of uptime. From a connectivity standpoint, it supports Bluetooth v2.0, Wi-Fi 802.11b/g, HSDPA/UMTS (2100 MHz for Europe, 850/1900 MHz for USA), and GSM/GPRS/EDGE (quad-band, 850/900/1800/1900MHz). Very impressive for a device that is only 16mm thick and weighs less than 360g.

But what I really like about this device is that it runs Microsoft Windows Mobile 5.0 Pocket PC Phone Edition, instead of XP of Vista, which are usually found on larger devices. When all your applications are online, the underlying operating system does not really matter anymore, and the simpler it is, the better. Starting a device running Windows Mobile is a lot faster that booting one running XP, Vista, or even Mac OS X, and Windows’ little brother is less vulnerable to malware, making for a much improved user experience overall. And you can even get Firefox to run on it!

Quite frankly, the only thing that does not make sense with the HTC Advantage is the use of a regular hard drive, instead of solid state storage, but it’s possible that one with skills and courage could swap the hard drive for a solid state drive.

I really cannot wait to play with one…