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If you bought an iPhone 4S you may well be suffering from a short battery life, and possibly echoes in calls when using a headset. But here’s some good news for you: Siri won’t run you up a massive bill, as it doesn’t use much data.
As a few of the most useful functions aren’t available in the UK until next year, you are currently limited to what you can ask Siri anyway, which means it should use even less of your data. Every cloud has a silver lining, we suppose.
ArsTechnica carried out the tests, and while we had imagined its investigations entailed pushing Siri up against a wall, shining a bright light in its face and demanding to know how much data it was using, it turns out that it actually split queries into two categories: local (dictation or setting reminders), and internet (finding info through Google or Wolfram Alpha).
The average data use across all 11 queries was 63kb, so even if you asked Siri all 11 every day for a month, it would only use about 20MB of data, which isn’t a lot in the age of 500MB or 1GB typical monthly allowances. That’s all over 3G too, we must point out — any over Wi-Fi would greatly reduce your usage.
Excellent news for our wallets. Now all we need is a fully working Siri in the UK. At present, it can’t find UK businesses or services, which is a pretty major bummer, and it won’t be able to do so until next year. See for yourself in our head-to-head video when it squared off against its Android rival. Still, at least when it is fully capable we won’t have to worry about massive phone bills.
Did you buy an iPhone 4S? Any problems with Siri, the battery life, or voice calls? Let us know on our Facebook page.
