Chinese HTC One trades in zero-gap aluminum construction for microSD card slot and dual-sim support

Sometime in the near future, the HTC One will be available to our friends over in China. Though the US HTC One will come in three distinct models tailored for AT&T, T-Mobile and Sprint’s networks, the design and internal specifications of the phone do not vary from its global counterpart. That’s certainly not the case for the HTC One variants heading to China Unicom, China Mobile  and China Telecom, the major service providers in China.

A new image of the China-bound HTC One 802w variant shows the back cover removed, revealing a microSD card slot and dual-SIM support. No accompanying details are given, but it looks like the Chinese HTC One will be substantially different than what we will be getting here in the west.

Before you get all bent out of shape that Chinese HTC One owners will be able to expand the phone’s internal storage with a microSD card, we’d like to point out that they phone in the picture was probably built from the ground up to for a market which cannot afford a $600 phone. The device in question does not have the same zero-gap aluminum shell as the HTC One we’ve come to love and the presence of a microSD card slot leads us to believe that the phone will not have 32GB or 64GB of internal storage. These component and build differences should allow HTC to sell the One in China at a more affordable price.

We doubt that Europe and North America will be getting the microSD slot equipped HTC One any time soon, but we certainly could see how such a device could gain more traction in developing markets. The good news is that the phone should be fairly easy to import one it hits the market, but don’t expect to get LTE or a high speed data connection with the phone here in the US.