Huawei ups R&D budget to $4.5b, focuses on gesture control
updated 10:50 am EDT, Mon April 30, 2012
Huawei focuses on cloud storage research, more
Chinese mobile hardware maker Huawei has boosted its research and development budget to $4.5 billion for this year, representing a 20 percent increase from 2011, ComputerWorld reported. The money will go towards introducing new technologies to smartphones, including inexpensive cloud storage and gesture control. The tech would use the front camera to capture the motion of a user's hands for three-dimensional interaction.
The general manager for Huawei's North American research and develop center, John Roese, said five fingers on a touchscreen limit the number of commands a user can make. Hand gestures, on the other hand, don't have such limitations and let users bring objects forward, rotate them, or otherwise control them in the graphical user interface.
Huawei believes two front-facing cameras and a powerful graphics processor will be needed to achieve this. The technology is expected to arrive gradually, and likely to come to tablets first.
Huawei also partnered with CERN on bringing new storage techniques to make it less expensive. The company's cloud storage system is used to process CERN's 15,360TB of physics data collected each year.
