2013 was supposed to be the year in which Samsung blew away the smartphone competition. It wasn't. Now, 2014 looks to be a soul-searching year for the Korean tech giant.

South Korea's Samsung has sold its entire stake in British chip maker CSR shortly after the company said it was retreating from the digital camera market.

Samsung could be planning to follow up the eye-tracking technology it introduced in the Galaxy S4 with new features in the Galaxy S5 that will keep track of the position of your entire head.

Sony is planning a range of products using "modular" wearable technology with lifestyle tracking applications, as part of a push to make the Japanese group the third-largest smartphone maker in the world after Apple and Samsung.

Samsung Electronics wants to parlay that technology into automotive navigation and entertainment systems for an industry that makes more than 80 million vehicles a year.

Samsung Electronics saw billions of dollars wiped off its market cap in the first hours of 2014 trading after investors bucked on concerns that the company's profit growth could slow in the new year.

In the ongoing battle between mobile technology titans Samsung and Apple, the California-based company recorded a triumphant victory in its South Korean rival's backyard this week.

There's absolutely no denying that mobile phone cameras are more than just a check-box item but have actually moved to the forefront of a product's feature set for many customers.

Samsung Electronics built the world's largest smartphone business by tapping China's cheap and abundant workforce. Not for much longer: it's shifting output to Vietnam to secure even lower wages and defend profit margins as growth in sales of high-end handsets slow.

"Our latest checks for the 20nm technology production levels at TSMC are weaker than expectations and are projected to reach only 5,000 wpm by year-end," say BlueFin Research Partners anaylsts.

The handset maker is working on a 20-megapixel camera it'll bundle into mobile devices in the second half of 2014.

South Korea's largest family-owned conglomerate, Samsung Group, on Monday promoted the group owner's daughter to president of its de-facto holding firm.

A software engineer formally involved in the development of the Siri voice assistant at Apple has joined Samsung's new talking internet of things initiative.

A Silicon Valley jury has ruled that Samsung must pay US$290m to Apple for copying iPhone and iPad features in its devices.

Apple came in at No. 46 on the European Union's R&D spending report released this week, which ranked the top 2,000 global companies.

Since its debut in late September, Samsung's Galaxy Gear smart watch has mustered sales of just 50,000 units, suggesting the device has not managed to gain sizable interest from the mass market.

Sources close to the situation said the deal that appears to be taking shape looks more like this: Samsung will use Globalfoundries for what is known as "flex capacity." This is a long-standing industry practice under which a chip manufacturer pays to occasionally use another company's factories when demand on their own factory is running higher than they would like, and they need a little help.

While LG and Samsung promote their curved handsets with bendable displays, rival Nokia appears to have been silently working on the next stage in flexible technology.

The semiconductor industry is in a standoff over the next big thing - 3D chip stacks. Someone needs to blink before the technology will be viable for creating the next generation of high-performance, low-power systems.

A patent of a foldable mobile device filed with authorities in South Korea last month gave some clues as to the future of Samsung mobile devices.

Lee Sang-hoon, Samsung's CFO, said the company was also considering another step, a listing of American depositary receipts, which would make it easier for individual investors to buy its shares.

Nokia and Samsung Electronics agreed to extend a broad licensing agreement through 2018, representing a rare example of harmony as patent wars rage on in the technology industry.

Secrecy has served Samsung Electronics well. Keeping its rivals guessing has helped Samsung, the South Korean technology giant, build a formidable lead in the smartphone industry, where it now sells more than one in three handsets worldwide.

Samsung has been awarded a Korean patent for a smart headset the company is calling "Sports Glasses."

Samsung likes software. Anyone who bought the Galaxy S4 already knows this; the handset comes loaded with proprietary software. There's eye tracking, advanced touch functionality, and an enterprise package called Knox. There's also a custom camera app, a TV remote app, a workout app, a travel app, a translation app... the list goes on and on.

Dongbu HiTek is not exactly a household name in the foundry business like TSMC, Globalfoundries and Samsung. But Dongbu, a company described by some as the industry's best kept secret, has been sharpening its strategy, honing its skills, and steadily expanding capacity in South Korea under Chang-Sik Choi, who became its president and CEO a year and a half ago.

Samsung Electronics has launched a handset with a curved display screen. The Galaxy Round smartphone will feature a 5.7in display

Its forecasts also indicate potentially slowing profit growth at its mobile business-a signal that its run of record results is under threat by rising competition and lower-margin phones taking up a bigger proportion of sales.

Samsung's upcoming Galaxy Gear smartwatch is seen as an extension of the smartphone, but research is under way to see how the wearable device could work with electronics such as TVs.

For a few hundred dollars, a US consumer can visit a local telecoms dealer and pick up a device manufactured by Samsung Electronics. But buying shares of the Korea-listed technology giant? Not so easy.

Samsung Electronics has begun commissioning equipment orders for its newly constructed semiconductor plant in Xian, China.

Chipworks found that the A7 chip is manufactured by Samsung. Chipworks also found what it believes to be the M7 motion coprocessor, which iFixit dubbed the "magical" chip because it couldn't be found on the logic board during the original teardown. Instead, the M7 is a discrete processor from NXP.

Luis Arbulu, a former Google business development and investment executive, has joined Samsung Electronics, Fortune has learned. He will be a Menlo Park-based director in Samsung's new Open Innovation Center, whose strategy includes making small early-stage investments into promising hardware and software startups.