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If you were a little let down by the iPhone 4S, but do like the look of its Siri voice-controlled assistant, then we have some very good news for you: someone has got Siri working on their iPhone 4!
Developer Steven Troughton-Smith has ported Siri to his iPhone 4, reports 9to5Mac, and while there are still some teething issues, it looks pretty impressive.
Obviously it’s not sanctioned by Apple, and will require a jailbroken iPhone 4… and it still won’t look up local services in the UK. But still, think of the money you’ll save on a new iPhone 4S.
You can see it in action here. It’ll recognise spoken commands in both standard Siri view and keyboard Dictation view, but Apple isn’t keen on this kind of jiggery pokery with its hardware, so isn’t authenticating commands to its servers from an iPhone 4. This means that US users carrying out the hack won’t be able to look up local services using Siri — a bit like being in the UK then.
Siri on the iPhone 4 does run a little sluggishly though. Apparently that’s down to a special GPU driver needed.
So it looks like there’s no technical reason Apple can’t bring Siri to the iPhone 4. The hardware supports it, and the A4 processor is (just) fast enough. One reason could be that it doesn’t run quite as slickly as on the iPhone 4S. That or Apple knows customers need more of an incentive to upgrade to the 4S than a slightly quicker processor, bigger hard drive and improved camera.
Siri can’t look up local information in the UK yet, because Apple doesn’t have a deal with a UK-based info provider, which is a bit of a bummer. So at the moment UK 4S owners are stuck with asking simple questions about the weather and suchlike.
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