Samsung Electronics is pouring US$116 billion into its next-generation chip business that includes fabricating silicon for external clients, betting it can finally close the gap on industry leader TSMC as soon as two years from now.

First they came for the bulky 30-pin docking connector. Then the 3.5mm headphone jack was removed from the iPhone. What will Apple remove next? A newly granted patent published today by the US Patent and Trademark Office offers another clue. In a bid to reduce the physical imperfections on the iPhone's external design, Apple could drop the lightning port.

The patent application, filed in South Korea, shows a contact lens equipped with a tiny display, a camera, an antenna, and several sensors that detect movement and the most basic form of input using your eyes: blinking. The display projects images directly into the eye of the wearer. An external device, a smartphone, is needed for processing.

AMD has introduced XConnect, a form of driver-level support for external graphics cards, as part of its latest Radeon 16.3 driver. XConnect allows users to add and remove a Thunderbolt 3 external graphics device (eGFX) such as the Razer Core, without needing to restart the PC, as well as switch between discrete and integrated graphics on-the-fly.

The strength of the Japanese yen as well as the ongoing European debt crisis have weighed on external demand.

OCZ said it will demonstrate an external hard drive at the CES show in Las Vegas. The drive uses Symwave's USB 3.0 storage controller and will deliver 10 times the transfer rate of USB 2.0 - which transfers data at 5Gb/s.

A little-known consumer solutions designer is laying claim to the first non-Apple external LCD displays for Mini DisplayPort-equipped Macs that are designed to look like the Mac maker's new LED-based Cinema Display offerings but retail for a fraction of the cost.