Huawei throws R&D dollars at gesture control, cloud storage, being more 'disruptive'

Undeterred by the fact that even humans struggle to interpret certain gestures, Huawei says it's allocating a chunk of its growing R&D budget to new motion-sensing technology for smartphones and tablets. The company's North American research chief, John Roese, told Computerworld that he wants to allow "three-dimensional interaction" with devices using stereo front-facing cameras and a powerful GPU to make sense of the dual video feed. Separately, the Chinese telecoms company is also putting development cash into a cloud computing project that promises to "change the economics of storage by an order of magnitude." Roese provided scant few details on this particular ambition, but did mention that Huawei has teamed up with CERN to conduct research and has somehow accumulated over 15 petabytes of experimental physics data in the process. Whatever it's up to, Huawei had better get a move on -- others are snapping up gesture recognition and cloud patents faster than you can say fa te ne una bicicletta with your hands.

Oppo teases 6.65mm-thick smartphone, about to steal 'world's thinnest' title from Huawei

China-based Poop Oppo is back again with yet another smartphone, only this time there's no pretty girl teasing Mr. DiCaprio. Instead, what we have here is an exclusive leak that shows off a 6.65mm-thick device -- just 0.03mm thinner than the Ascend P1 S from local rival Huawei. In other words, if all goes well then Oppo will have us the world's slimmest smartphone. Details are scarce at the moment, but judging by the above picture this phone will come with a metallic bezel of some sort, along with three capacitive buttons and a three-pin contact for dock connection. Obviously, stay tuned for more deets.

Huawei announces Ascend P1 availability details

 Huawei Ascend P1 will be available in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Australia through operators and retailers by May 2012, in Latin America from June 2012 and in Europe from summer, with availability in other markets to follow.

The Ascend P1 features a dual-core 1.5GHz TI OMAP 4460 Cortext-A9 processor and measures 7.69mm thin and 64.8 mm long. With a 4.3-inch super AMOLED 960×540 touch screen with Corning Gorilla Glass, an 8-megapixel BSI rear-facing camera and Dolby Mobile 3.0 + 5.1 surround sound technology, the Ascend P1 has some pretty decent specifications on paper.