HTC has officially announced the HTC One max, the largest device in the One family, with a 5.9-inch Full HD display.

Pushing into the phablet territory, the HTC One max comes with many of the design features of the HTC One, with a body that's finished in aluminium, but looks more like a large HTC One mini than the original HTC One.

That's because the HTC One max has a removable back, giving you access to the SIM card tray and the microSD card slot, to expand the storage over the 16/32GB internally.

Around the front, the 5.9-inch Super LCD3 display gives you a 1920 x 1080 pixel resolution (373ppi) and it's sandwiched between the distinctive BoomSound speakers.

This is the first HTC device for a while to launch without Beats Audio, although with BoomSound being a home-grown HTC solution, we can't see too many being really bothered about that.

But those speakers help make the HTC One max quite the handful, measuring 164.5 x 82.5 x 10.29mm and weighing in at 217g. That makes it larger in all directions than the 5.7-inch Samsung Galaxy Note 3, and nearly 50g heavier.

Sitting at the heart of the HTC One max is a 1.7GHz quad-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 600 chipset and 2GB of RAM. Flip the phone over and you'll find a fingerprint scanner on the rear, which can be programmed with up to three fingers, to unlock or launch apps directly.

Around the back is also the 4-megapixel UltraPixel camera, although in the HTC One max loses out on the optical image stabilisation of the flagship HTC One. Otherwise it's a f/2.0 aperture 28mm lens, offering all the fancy tricks of the HTC One camera. There's a 2-megapixel front-facing camera as well.

There have been some neat additions, however, as the HTC One max debuts Sense 5.5 on Android 4.3 at launch. There's refinement to BlinkFeed, tweaks to the camera and galleries and a range of other extras. There's also been a switch in allegiance from Dropbox to Google Drive: the HTC One max comes with 50GB of Google Drive space.

READ: HTC Sense 5.5 vs Sense 5: New features, tweaks and changes reviewed

Powering this beast of a handset is a 3300mAh battery, with HTC citing 25 hours talk time.

The HTC One max will be available in the UK almost immediately, but we'll update with an exact date and price when we have it. Fortunately, we already have the HTC One max, so read our full review now!

READ: HTC One max review