No joke: The HTC One with 64 GB looks like an AT&T exclusive

Those hoping for an HTC One smartphone with 64 GB of internal storage may have their carrier options very limited in the U.S. A promotional YouTube video shows the higher storage capacity handset as an AT&T exclusive, although there haven’t been any official carrier announcements to confirm or deny. However, the video, found by Droid Life, is posted on AT&T’s official YouTube account, lending credibility to the information.

In most cases, this exclusivity on storage wouldn’t be a big deal, but the HTC One has no expandable memory slot. That means you’ll always be limited to the internal storage that comes with the handset; there’s no microSD card. Presumably then, all other U.S. carriers will get the 32 GB storage version of the HTC One.

I’ve been using a Galaxy Nexus with 16 GB of non-expandable storage for over a year without any issues as I lean heavily on the cloud. Even with my reliance on cloud storage, there are times when I can’t load a large app — typically a game — on the phone because there isn’t enough storage available.

Personally, I’m still not a fan of exclusives on handsets or specific configurations of them: I see no benefit to the consumer, just to the carrier with the exclusive. I’m guessing that some folks won’t be happy about this news as they’d prefer to have the option between a 32 GB and 64 GB HTC One on the network operator of choice.

And I don’t think this move will help HTC sell more phones, which is something the company desperately needs to do. Instead, it could lose some customers to a 64 GB version of Samsung’s Galaxy S 4 — or even a lower capacity GS4 since it has a memory expansion slot — due to this exclusive.