Talk about next gen phones- when I think about this, I think about Tony Stark working in his laboratory building some sort of cool new toy! Imagine, not touching your phone to do stuff? That’s exactly what Huawei wants us to do.
Huawei is a Chinese telecommunications supplier. They have been expanding into the smartphone, tablet and cloud storage business on both the enterprise and consumer side, and sold 20 million smartphones last year.
Huawei has been beefing up their research and development, last year alone hiring 11,000 new employees and spending just under $4 billion dollars on R&D alone. Additionally, they are projecting increasing that number by 20% for 2012. All of this is geared towards producing “disruptive” technology, or technology that will change the market. Think of it like the introduction of the laptop and how it changed personal computing.
“We are focused on disruptive technology and taking interesting ideas and turning them into something exciting,” said John Roese, general manager for Huawei’s North American research and develop center.
Roese went on to describe the possibility of the touch free phone. Being limited to touch limits phones to what they can do. Using a powerful processor, and two cameras could allow the smartphone to read user’s hand movements allowing them to control objects using gestures- bringing them forwards, back, rotating, etc. An existing, real life example is Microsoft’s Kinect. Roese acknowledges that processor power of this sort isn’t there yet, so it will be an evolutionary process and will likely start with tablets.
In addition to touch free phones, Huawei also wants to change the cloud storage market by making storage less expensive. They are currently using a cloud storage system that processes and stores 15,360 TB’s of data each year via a partnership with CERN– the European Organization for Nuclear Research. I find the idea itself a novel one: A free backup service that I only have to pay when I need my data restored. Much better than paying for something I may never need. It’s a shame car insurance isn’t sold like this. If it were, I would have an extra $30K on hand. Maybe not- I probably would have spent it on more cool gadgets.