There’s been rapid growth in global sales from Huawei’s devices division, which sells consumer products such as smartphones, mobile phones, tablets and wireless cards. China’s Huawei Technologies Co Ltd, one of the world’s top network equipment makers, launched its cloud computing smartphones today, looking to ride a mobile industry boom that drove a 64 percent sales rise in its devices unit during the first half of the year.

Shipments jumped nearly 40 percent to 72 million units, the privately held Huawei said in a statement. Cellphones formed the majority of its shipments this year.  Shenzhen-based Huawei and Chinese rival ZTE Corp, which have traditionally concentrated on the network equipment business, are aggressively muscling in on mobile devices to take advantage of the consumer boom in this arena.

“Cellphones have been a cash cow for Huawei over the past few years, but I don’t think it can replace its main business in network equipment,” said Jane Wang, a Beijing-based analyst at UK research firm Ovum.

“In a way, we saw cellphones as a key compliment to its business because it allows then to work more closely with telecom operators.”

The company, known for its low-cost cellphones, is betting its new cloud-oriented model will help it replicate its telecom gear success in the booming smartphone market.  It’s in this space that Huawei will take on the likes of Nokia, Apple and Samsung Electronics.

“We are targeting at what we call the young social networkers for this smartphone,” Victor Xu, chief strategy and marketing officer for Huawei Device, told reporters in Beijing at the launch of its “Vision” smartphones.

Huawei is targeting 2011 shipments of more than one million units of the smartphone, which comes with the blockbuster game Angry Birds pre-installed.  It’s through strategic partnerships and smart positioning that the company plans to boost its revenue in the consumer electronics space and aims to become the world’s third largest cellphone maker within five years.

In July, Huawei Device executives said the firm aimed to ship 20 million smartphones this year, higher than a previous target of 12 million-15 million units.  In June, Huawei unveiled its MediaPad, a 7-inch Android-based tablet computer in Singapore, and is also developing a 10-inch device to be launched this year.

With connected devices on the rise, gadgets like smartphones and tablets are becoming central portals in the rising cloud industry.  A report from Appcelerator highlights mobile developer’s upcoming plans for incorporating cloud backends into their overall strategy for delivering mobile apps and services, indicating a growing prevelance across the mobile space.

The cloud-based file management provider Syncplicity launches iPhone app today as well, expanding virtual private cloud capabilities. The new Syncplicity iPhone app has been designed to give Syncplicity users universal mobile access to all their files and folders, while meeting key business requirements such as security, backup and versioning.

Syncplicity is taking cloud-based file management to the next level by enabling customers to manage their own virtual private cloud, giving them seamless anytime, anywhere access to their data – regardless of whether it is stored across multiple computers, mobile devices, corporate servers or cloud applications like Google Docs.

“With more data, file types, mobile devices and cloud apps, the level of complexity that users face managing their data has skyrocketed. Syncplicity solves the challenges of accessing, syncing, sharing, versioning, backing up and managing files by giving users a simple, universal way to master all of their files in place, without moving a single file, that securely leverages cloud computing,” noted Leonard Chung, Syncplicity’s co-founder and Chief Product Strategist.