Huawei has largely been known as a OEM manufacturer for carriers but lately they’ve been stepping up their game. With their own in-house quad-core processor, and their new Ascend P1 super-slim smartphones and more. New details have now confirmed they’ve been investing heavily into Microsoft Kinect type gestures for their upcoming smartphones.

Not only are they expanding their hardware, but they are taking large steps to further expand software too. We’ve heard of this before when Google patented gestures using the front facing camera on smartphones earlier this year and now Huawei is looking to do the same, along with many other manufacturers we’re assuming.

According to our sister site SlashGear, Huawei spent around $3.7 billion last year in R&D, and much of their focus was on gesture-like controls. For 2012 they are looking to increase that by 20% and spend as much as $4.5b for research and development as they try to increase their numbers in the mobile market. Apparently Huawei also wants to develop and deploy their own cloud storage option with their smartphones to rival Google Drive, Dropbox and others. Huawei could become a much bigger player in the months that lie ahead.