Huawei to Boost R&D to Develop Touch-Free Smartphones

Huawei Technologies is the second-largest supplier of mobile telecommunications. The company has over 62,000 products and solution research and development employees, comprising more than 44 per cent of Huawei's total employees worldwide, claims Huawei.

Huawei aims to develop touch-free smartphones as well as inexpensive cloud storage service. According to IDG News, the company is increasing its 2012 research and development budget by 20 per cent to about $4.5 billion in order to provide disruptive technologies which will change the market landscape.

One of the technologies that Huawei aims to bring is touch-free smartphones or tablets which will recognise hand gestures without the need to touch the gadget."What if you use the camera of a tablet or a smartphone and use it to capture the visualisation of your hands," said John Roese, General Manager for Huawei's North American R&D centre. "So imagine instead of touching a smartphone, you can actually have a three-dimensional interaction with it," said Roese.

The largest China-based networking and telecommunications equipment company is reportedly expanding into the consumer and enterprise sides and developing smartphones, tablets and cloud storage services.

Huawei is the world's sixth largest mobile phone maker and it expects to ship more than 100 million mobile phones in 2012 including 60 million smartphones thereby boosting its global market share, according to Reuters. The company focuses on selling high-end smartphones which could fetch high margins in the competitive smartphone market.

Currently, plenty of touchscreen devices are available which allow multitouch (ten fingers). Roese believes hand gestures will allow users to easily move the objects in any direction within the device's user interface (UI).

Similar technology is in use in Microsoft's Xbox 360 Kinect device. The motion sensing input device lets players interact with the Xbox 360 without touching the game controller, by just using gestures and spoken commands. Sony's Xperia Sola Android smartphone too allows users to just move his/her finger over links to highlight them.

It is reported that Huawei will come up with touch-free devices with powerful graphics processor. It could introduce two front-facing cameras which can be used to read hand gestures of the user.

The company is also expected to produce an inexpensive cloud storage service. Already its cloud storage system is being utilised in storing 15360TB of physics data each year. Roese believes that the latest technology could revolutionise the computing storage architecture. "If we are successful, which I think we will be, it literally could change the economics of storage by an order of a magnitude," said Roese.