HTC’s latest flagship phone, the HTC One, has proven to be a big success so far, with 5 million units sold since it launched back in March. However, some way that the HTC One could have done better if it had support for a microSD card.

Now HTC has explained the reason behind its decision to leave microSD card slots out of its U.S. and U.K. versions of the HTC One.

Jeff Gordon, HTC’s Senior Global Online Communications Manager, provided us with answers to a couple of questions that we have been asking for a while now — not only about the One’s lack of a microSD card, but also its lack of support for Verizon.

Gordon provided a fairly detailed response to the first question regarding the microSD card slots, however his response to the Verizon question was fairly short and brief.

It became obvious to HTC One owners fairly quickly that their U.S. and U.K. models did not include microSD slots, whereas Asia’s version of the HTC One did; apparently, this decision came down to a factor of space within the device — it appears that China’s version of the HTC One is designed for smaller radio bands, therefore the devices have additional space to add microSD slots. This was also the case for the Japanese version.

However, the global version of the One runs off of larger radio bands, therefore the additional space was needed within the device, resulting in the lack of microSD card slots.

Gordon provided a very brief and sloppy response to the question about Verizon, which is America’s most popular and powerful carrier. All he said was “it’s always a great thing to have our phones on as many operators as possible, but we’ve got nothing to announce in terms of Verizon.”

This leads us to believe that the HTC One may not be coming to Verizon any time soon, which is a shame considering the HTC One is a very popular device, and many loyal Verizon customers can’t get their hands on one.

However, this doesn’t rule out the possibility of the HTC One ever coming to Big Red. There are many rumours indicating that it may be coming in the near future — the most popular rumour suggests that Verizon requested their own version of the HTC One, and HTC failed to comply, resulting in this tedious time-lapse, waiting for the companies to renegotiate.

• SourceTechRadar