The iPhone 4S has begun shipping to anxious customers in seven countries and most of them are really excited to try Siri voice assistant. Many of our readers wonder whether it would be possible to get Siri on iPhone 4? It just might be possible as a video of Siri working on iPhone 4 has surfaced, promising the fact that in future we might just be able to use Siri on non-iPhone 4S devices.
When Apple announced iPhone 4S at the October 4 media event, most people were disappointed because they had been waiting for a fully redesigned iPhone 5. However as features kept being unveiled, Siri voice assistant was one feature that left all of the attendees as well as those following the event through liveblogs completely awesome. Siri is artificial intelligence at its best. If you give Siri any command from this list, it would do the appropriate task for you. Siri can set your reminders, read back and reply to your emails and messages, enter or edit appointments and meetings in the calendar, search Wikipedia and WolframAlpha, give weather and stock updates as well as a lot more. Its truly magical and most probably the best feature on iPhone 4S.
Well known iOS developer Steven Troughton-Smith has been working in collaboration with the guys over at 9to5mac and has managed to port Siri on iPhone 4. He was able to do this by installing the iPhone 4S Siri as well as SpringBoard files on iPhone 4. Keep in mind that this isn't a fully functional Siri port on iPhone 4 right now, just think of this as the first few steps of a full Siri port. Video embedded below:
As you can see in the video, Siri on iPhone 4 is making not only itself but the whole smartphone painstakingly slow. That's because a specific kind of GPU driver is needed for this to function flawlessly on iPhone 4 and that driver is not located in the iPhone 4S binary cache. Nevertheless Siri on iPhone 4 can recognize voice commands including those given in Dictation view. Apple isn't authenticating commands to its servers from Siri because its running on iPhone 4 hardware, for which it is obviously not intended for.
At this point in time, it has only been proved that Siri can work on iPhone 4 and if it works on that, it can very well work on the iPod touch 4G as well. However its possible the A5 processor plays a major part in making Siri work much more flawlessly but we do know now that the A4 processor is capable enough of handling Siri. Obvious question, why is Apple making Siri exclusive to iPhone 4S? The only logical reason which comes to mind is that if they don't make it exclusive, the iPhone 4S loses out an a major selling point.
For those waiting for a Siri on iPhone 4 port by means of a jailbreak, it was recently reported that it won't be possible in the near future because at this time, porting Siri requires piracy. Some developers are of the view that a tool can be created that can simply transfer Siri from iPhone 4S to other iOS devices, for now we can just wait and see how this pans out. We'll obviously keep you updated.