MacRumors

Apple today seeded the fifth beta of an upcoming watchOS 4.3 update to developers, one week after seeding the fourth beta and a three weeks after releasing watchOS 4.2.3, a minor update focusing on bug fixes.

Once the proper configuration profile has been installed from the Apple Developer Center, the new watchOS beta can be downloaded through the dedicated Apple Watch app on the iPhone by going to General --> Software update.

To install the update, the Apple Watch needs to have at least 50 percent battery, it has to be placed on the charger, and it needs to be in range of the iPhone it's paired to.

watchOS 4.3 introduces support for Nightstand mode in portrait orientation, a feature that was previously only available when the watch was placed in landscape orientation. There's also a new charging animation when the Apple Watch is placed on the charger, a new app loading animation, your Activity data is now displayed on the Siri watch face, and the battery complication more accurately reports battery life.

The watchOS 4.3 update also brings the return of a much-desired feature that allows music playing on the iPhone to be controlled using the Music app on the Apple Watch.

In prior versions of watchOS, starting with watchOS 4, the Music app could only be used to control music playing on the watch itself. With the tvOS 11.3 beta installed, there's also an option to control music playing on the Apple TV with the watch.

Apple plans to release watchOS 4.3 to the public in the spring, and until then, it will be limited to developers. Apple offers public betas of tvOS, iOS, and macOS, but watchOS betas are not available for public beta testers because there's no way to revert to an earlier version of watchOS once an update is installed.

The price for Google's YouTube TV subscription service will be increasing to $40 per month for new subscribers starting tomorrow, up from the current price of $35 per month.

Google first warned potential subscribers about the new pricing for YouTube TV in February, and today is the last day to sign up at the current $35 per month price point. Existing subscribers will continue to be able to pay $35 per month for the service.

Introduced in April of 2017, YouTube TV is a live streaming television service designed to compete with services like Sling TV, Hulu with Live TV, DirecTV Now, and Playstation Vue.

YouTube TV provides subscribers with access to TV shows on more than 40 channels, with participating networks that include ABC, CBS, Fox, NBC, the CW, Disney, ESPN, FX, USA, and dozens more.

As of early February, YouTube TV launched an Apple TV app, making the subscription service available on all Apple devices. YouTube TV is available in a wide range of locations across the United States.

Apple engineers are slated to join in on several discussions covering display technology and augmented/virtual reality at Display Week, which is set to take place at the Los Angeles Convention Center from May 22 to May 25.

Apple's Cheng Chen, a director of Display Optics and Platform Technologies, will kick off the event chairing a keynote session that covers three discussions: "OLED Leading to the New Experience of Display," "Reactive Displays: Unlocking Next-Generation VR/AR Visuals with Eye Tracking," and "Blue LEDs and Transformative Electronics for Developing Sustainable Smart Society," with speakers Deqiang Zhang (CEO of Visionox), Douglas Lanman (Director of Computational Imaging at Oculus Research), and Hiroshi Amano (Director of the Center for Integrated Research of Future Electronics), respectively.

Engineers from Apple will also chair and co-chair a range of discussion sessions, outlined below:

• AR/VR I Display Systems
• OLED Driving and Compensation
• Micro-LED Epitaxial Semiconductor Materials & Manufacturing
• Image Processing (Display Electronics)
• Micro-LED Device Processing and Hetero-Integration
• Novel OLEDs
• Micro-LED System Integration and Applications
• Capacitive-Touch Displays
• Projection: Screen Technology
• QD Electroluminescence I
• Fingerprint Sensing and Optical Sensing Displays
• Color Gamut
• Enhancements to AR/VR

Apple engineers will also serve as moderators at two Monday seminars, including "SE-8: Artificial Intelligence: Image Recognition and Visual Understanding with Deep Learning Techniques" and "Quantum-Dot Displays: Advances and Outlook."

Apple has always been a notoriously secretive company, but over the course of the last several years, Apple has been loosening restrictions and allowing its engineers and researchers to publish papers and share their work in an effort to contribute to the research community. This decision also allows Apple to continue to attract top employees who might not otherwise join the company without being able to share their research.

The Display Week event is designed for and limited to professionals who are part of the display industry. It is hosted by the Society for Information Display and will be attended by many of the world's most prominent technology companies.

Apple Maps recently inked a deal with Ito World, which adds bike-sharing data to Apple Maps in more than 175 cities across 36 countries, reports TechCrunch.

The feature went live this morning, and Apple Maps users can now type "bike sharing" or a specific service name like GoBike into the search bar to get results for nearby bike sharing options.

Apple previously had some available bike-sharing data in a few cities in Apple Maps, but with the Ito World partnership, it's more widely available. Ito World has signed deals with dozens of companies to license bike sharing data.

Bike sharing information is somewhat limited at the current time, as all Apple Maps lists is the location of the bike sharing stop rather than information on available bikes or empty docks for dropping off a bike.

According to TechCrunch, Apple Maps supports a wide range of services like Citi Bike in New York City, Ford GoBike in San Francisco, Biketown in Portland, Santander Cycles in London, Bicing in Barcelona, BIXI in Montreal, and more.

Apple today seeded the fifth beta of an upcoming tvOS 11.3 update to developers for testing purposes, one week after seeding the fourth beta and three weeks after releasing the tvOS 11.2.6 update.

Designed for the fourth and fifth-generation Apple TV models, the tvOS 11.3 developer beta can be downloaded onto the Apple TV via a profile that's installed using Xcode and Apple Configurator.

Early tvOS 11.3 updates introduced support for AirPlay 2, allowing the Apple TV to be added to the Home app as part of a HomeKit setup and enabling multiple Apple TVs in separate rooms to play the same song, but that functionality was removed in tvOS 11.3 beta 3.

It is not yet clear if Apple plans to re-add AirPlay 2 features ahead of the release of tvOS 11.3, but it's a possibility because there are still several betas to go.

Other new features in tvOS 11.3 include enhancements to Match Content support, automatic frame rate switching on the fourth-generation Apple TV (a feature that was added to Apple TV 4K in a past tvOS update), and automatic mode switching for AirPlay video sessions.

Update: Apple has also made a new beta of tvOS 11.3 available to public beta testers.

Amazon is now allowing users to make phone calls, video calls, and send messages from an iPad, Android, or Fire tablet to an Alexa-enabled Echo device. Previously, users had to activate calls or send messages using an Echo, so now it should be easier to communicate within Amazon's Alexa ecosystem (via Engadget). To receive calls, users need any device with the Alexa app installed or an Echo speaker.

The update also introduces Drop In support for the Alexa app on iPads and other tablets, meaning that iPad users can quickly send a message to someone near an Echo in a different room. Engadget noted that the new features are easiest to access on Amazon's own Fire HD 10 tablet, where Alexa is supported across the software, but iPad users will of course first have to open the Alexa iOS app to initiate calls and send messages.

Amazon's Alexa assistant has been in the news recently for scaring some users after creepily laughing for no apparent reason. Amazon has acknowledged the events and said it's working on a fix to roll out to affected users. Additionally, late last week Alexa gained a new "Follow-Up Mode," which lets the assistant respond to multiple questions in quick succession, without requiring the user to repeat the "Alexa" wake up command.

Amazon Alexa is available on the iOS App Store for free. [Direct Link]

Rihanna is the world's most streamed female recording artist on Apple Music, ahead of Taylor Swift, Beyoncé, and Ariana Grande.

Apple recently announced that the Barbadian singer has become the first female artist to surpass two billion streams worldwide on Apple Music, having achieved the milestone on International Women's Day last Thursday.

It's unclear if the count is limited to Rihanna's own songs or includes her features in songs by other artists like Drake, Eminem, and Jay-Z, but it's an impressive accomplishment either way on the heels of her 30th birthday.

Rihanna topped Apple Music's list of the top 20 most streamed female artists worldwide:

1. Rihanna
   

2. Taylor Swift
   

3. Beyoncé
   

4. Ariana Grande
   

5. Adele
   

6. Sia
   

7. Lana Del Rey
   

8. Selena Gomez
   

9. SZA
   

10. Lady Gaga
    

11. Katy Perry
    

12. Nicki Minaj
    

13. Demi Lovato
    

14. Halsey
    

15. Fifth Harmony
    

16. P!nk
    

17. Kehlani
    

18. Mariah Carey
    

19. Little Mix
    

20. Miley Cyrus

All eight of Rihanna's studio albums are available to stream on Apple Music, whereas some artists don't offer their complete discography on the service.

At CES in January, Philips announced that it was working on a line of Hue lights for outdoors, so that users could connect and control their lighting on a patio, balcony, or other environment outside. Today, the company has revealed the first set of Philips Hue outdoor range products that will be launching in the United States and Europe this July.

Philips noted that the outdoor products will be available in both the Philips Hue white and Philips Hue white and color ambiance ranges. The outdoor devices will be fully compatible with the Philips hue ecosystem and work "in the same way as the indoor range," Philips explained. Users will just have to connect their outdoor lights to their Philips Hue bridges, and the new lights will appear in the Hue app and Apple's Home app so that they can be controlled with taps and through Siri.

The new lights include the Philips Hue Lily, which can be used to highlight key features in a garden, and the Philips Hue Calla, which can be placed in the ground and light pathways through outdoor spaces. Philips said the new line is designed for outdoor weather conditions and each fixture is easy to install.

“Our customers are always looking for new ways to extend their smart lighting system and the new Philips Hue outdoor range takes it a huge step further,” said Sridhar Kumaraswamy, Business Leader Home Systems & Luminaires at Philips Lighting. “While Philips Hue bulbs and luminaires are available for every area inside your home, we wanted to traverse the threshold and offer connected luminaires designed for outside areas. The Philips Hue outdoor range enables you to make the most of your outside areas, be it creating the ideal ambiance to host a BBQ at the weekend or beautifying your garden.”

In terms of price, the Philips Hue outdoor Lily base pack will cost $279.99/€299.99, including three lights and "all the accessories you need to get started." The Calla bollard base pack will be the cheaper option at $129.99/€139.99. There will also be a number of standalone lighting products in the white range, including Lucca, Tuar, Turaco, and Ludere, with prices starting at $49.99/€69.99.

The company didn't give any further information on the upcoming Hue app version 3.0 update for iOS and Android devices, expected for Q2 2018. At CES, Philips said the update will "enhance" existing features while also adding in new ones so that Hue lights can be activated "with even more ease."

Over the weekend, iFixit shared its latest teardown, this one for Samsung's upcoming Galaxy S9+ smartphone. The Galaxy S9 and S9+ will both launch this Friday, March 16 for around for $720 and $840, respectively, and some initial reviews took to comparing the devices to Apple's iPhone X.

iFixit did so as well in the new teardown, starting off by trying to get into the back of the S9+ to look at its rear-facing camera components. After applying heat, the iFixit team got into the smartphone and found its dual-aperture camera system, which the team described as one of the only significant hardware changes this year.

iFixit explained that the S9+ has a rear-facing camera that automatically adjusts its aperture for low light, and at f/1.5 it has the widest aperture of any phone. For normal photos, Samsung's new device still has a "more standard" f/2.4 aperture. In comparison, the iPhone X's dual 12 MP rear cameras include f/1.8 and f/2.4 apertures.

Standard camera lenses use at least five aperture blades to keep the aperture roughly circular throughout many f-stop adjustments. This Galaxy's aperture has just two rotating, ring-like blades for its single adjustment.

After some trouble dislodging the rear fingerprint sensor, iFixit moved to focus on the battery within the S9+ and discovered a 3.85V, 3,500 mAh battery. As the iFixit team pointed out, the battery in the S9+ shares the same specs as those found in the S8+ last year, and in the Note7 in 2016. The iPhone X's battery teardown uncovered a 3.81V, 2,716 mAh battery in Apple's smartphone.

Eventually, the team got underneath the S9+ display and compared its front-facing camera components side-by-side with the iPhone X. iFixit noted that Samsung's AR Emoji are "lower-tech" compared to Apple's Animoji, mainly because the S9+ front-facing hardware -- composed of an iris scanner, camera, IR emitter, and proximity sensor -- are "pretty much exactly" the same as the tech from the Galaxy S8+.

Because of this, iFixit pointed out that it might have been a bit too soon for Samsung to debut its own animated emoji characters "without a hardware update to bring it up to speed." To further explain the distance between the technologies, the teardown team described Apple's Animoji as having Kinect-level tracking, while Samsung's emoji are more akin to Snapchat filters.

iFixit gave the Samsung Galaxy S9+ a repairability score of 4 out of 10, explaining that there are a few modular components while noting the chance for breakage if attempting to repair the display and rear glass panel. The iPhone X fared slightly better in its teardown with a 6 out of 10 score. To read more about the Galaxy S9+ and its teardown, visit iFixit's website.

Apple has updated its Made for iPhone, Made for iPad, and Made for iPod logos, and accessory makers have 90 days from when the change was announced in mid February to begin using them, according to ChargerLab.

The new decals look similar, but they have Apple logos in place of iPhone, iPad, and iPod icons. Apple has also moved iPod from first to last in the list, as the iPhone and iPad have long overshadowed the portable media player. The new logos use Apple's San Francisco font, compared to Myriad Pro previously.

Made for iPhone, Made for iPad, and Made for iPod logos inform customers that an electronic accessory has been certified by the developer to meet Apple's performance standards. To use the logos, accessory makers must apply to be a MFi Program licensee, and receive approval from Apple.

MFi-licensed technologies include the Lightning connector, CarPlay, GymKit, HomeKit, game controllers, and hearing aids, among others. MFi Program certification is not required for accessories that only make use of standard Bluetooth profiles supported by iOS, or accessories that only use the 3.5mm headphone jack.

For customers, this isn't a significant change. But, next time you're shopping for Apple-certified accessories, be aware the logos will soon change on packaging. It doesn't appear the similar Made for Apple Watch decal has changed.

(Thanks, Nick!)