“Apple is apparently trying out Siri on devices other than the iPhone 4S, according to reports circulating over the weekend,” Darrell Etherington writes for GigaOM.
“It comes as no surprise that Apple would want to see how Siri works on different devices, but how likely is it that those of us who aren’t Apple engineers will ever get the chance to use the personal assistant on anything older than an iPhone 4S?” Etherington asks.
“For late-model devices, there doesn’t appear to be any technical barrier really standing in the way of getting Siri working,” Etherington writes. “The iPhone 4, apparently, can run it just fine with a few simple software modifications. And if Apple’s 2010 smartphone can handle it, it’s almost guaranteed that the iPad 2, and likely even the latest generation iPod touch can do the same.”
Etherington writes, “I think it’s likely Apple will eventually bring Siri to other older devices, but maybe not all that are technically capable of running it.”
Read more in the full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Readers “Fred Mertz” and “Dan K.” for the heads up.]
Related article:
Apple may release Siri for iPhone 4; seeds internal build for testing – November 5, 2011
Pretty likely.
not fast enough…
There’s no technical reason not to. Siri offloads most of its background processes to the NC cloud and does not depend on the on board CPU. It’s being withheld to goose 4S sales.
Here,here!
Hear, Hear, not here, here. Look it up.
Maybe he’s in North Carolina.
Exactly… Think about it, without Siri, the iPhone 4 is more likely to be chosen over the 4s as its cheaper and the other differences are negligible.. I don’t know if this would work in every country as the price difference on contracts might give greater value to the 4s…
Remember, new IPhone 4s (not 4S) are available with 8 GB only. Frankly, for many people that is not enough. I had a 16 GB iPhone 4, and it was tight. I went with a 32 GB 4S, flirting with the 64GB model. But with only 8GB, even with Siri, it won’t cripple 4S sales.
Funny how we’re all worrying about whether Apple will bring their rockstar new feature to an 18 month old phone model, and yet over on many Android devices you can’t even upgrade to the next version of the OS itself once you “drive off the lot”.
I wonder if Apple is concerned about the strain on the network, if even the older iPhone 4 had Siri. I have already noticed occasional hiccups with Siri due to an inability to connect, and I was on a broadband WiFi connection at the time.
Perhaps when Apple has a solid idea of network traffic with the new 4s, they can anticipate the strain on the network with added legacy phones.
I thought I read elsewhere that the issue with Siri on the iPhone 4 is the microphone, which is slightly inferior. This is important, because I believe Siri picks up on not just the phonic sounds but inflection and emphasis. They’ll have to work around with software to compensate.
——RM
You’re assuming that the NC servers are just loafing along processing all those Siri requests. It just may be that they’re almost maxed out handling just the 4S phones. After all, it is a beta ya know.
I think its being withheld because its still in beta and it allows Apple to control and limit how many devices are “testing” the beta. So as not to overload their servers etc. If they released it to other devices it obviously increase the load big time !
It’s “beta”, when it’s not beta it may be brought to other devices. Plus, the NC data center is being ramped up. Noone wants a MobileMe mess, so ramp it up slowly.
… “For the second day in a row, Siri suffered intermittent failures that prevented people from using it.”.
Adding: “a number of bloggers and pundits have pointed out, including Jon Gruber at Daring Fireball, Apple labeled Siri a “beta” technology”.
I’m kind of hoping it will become available for my iPad2 soon.
The jailbreakers even got it running on an iPhone 3GS.
I think Apple just needs more time before they can allow an extra 200 million people to start hitting up Siri on the reg. They’d be fools not to have it on every iOS device possible, especially the iPad.
Silly article.
The opportunity is clear and legacy devices are less important than serving all other platforms, including the Mac.
it would be crazy to limit Siri.
Not only is it likely that Siri will come to other iOS devices, it will more than likely come to the Mac and also be the new Apple TV’s main interface.
Apple has its hands full getting Siri stable on the comparatively few iP4Ss out there. Opening it up at this time to the installed base of iPhone 4s and iPads would crush the servers. Once things get nailed down and scaling issues sorted out, then we may see it on more devices.
Siri isn’t going to work very well on an iPod Touch, iPad or iPad 2 that doesn’t have a GPS. It’ll do ok with wifi, but it won’t give you an exact location. Not a great user experience.
There’s plenty it can do without location-based info. Canadian 4S users don’t have any location-aware functionality right now, except maybe geo-fencing (“remind me when I leave work….” type requests) which I haven’t tried yet.
Siri won’t even tell me “what time is it” unless I turn off its location services, or specify “what time is it in “.
It’s a controlled Beta. With the iPhone 4S they no exactly how many are going into the market and at what rate. This allows them to ramp up the server load, etc…
I think it will come to other devices like the iPad 2.
I want it on my mac but it needs to truly be capable of understanding context.
When i come in the room ranting “Siri you stupid f*cking c*nt….” it needs to understand that im not angry … just passionate about something …
Without that “understanding” siri will end up being just another useless broad in my life and at some point ill throw her out on her @ss.
I’m with everyone that think the servers can’t handle the load at the moment. It needs more time to mature before then. I have an IPhone 4 at the moment and I was sure that Apple will add Siri to the IPhone 4 in the near future. So I did not upgrade for the first time since the first IPhone in 07. Siri is the only upgrade I wanted, and it’s coming to the 4.
If the Siri servers can handle it ,Apple should bring Siri to other devices. This is what will hobble google and be the basis for iTV which could be huge. Then even my wife could turn on the TV!
Siri has been hit-and-miss for me. The basics, it’s great at. I call my wife, set alarms, ask to list the closest such-and-such, all good.
But last night I asked what I thought was a simple question: “What’s the distance from Washington DC to Baltimore?”. Siri gave me directions from my current location to Washington. I rephrased as “How far is it from…” and got the same result.
Worse, if I changed the question to put Baltimore first, Siri would get confused and tell me she could only give directions from my current location.
This is odd, considering that this information is very easy to search for, and odder still considering that Siri can famously answer “How far is it to the Moon”?
Siri’s cool, but she’s clearly still beta.
——RM
Apple really has no incentive to do this. It is one of the distinguishing features of the 4s over the previous models of phones. Each iphone has had features the ones before it didn’t have, it would make sense that the 4s and future models would have siri, but not anything previous.
What about advancing the use of Siri as a search platform and getting another leg up on Google? Isn’t that incentive enough?
I mean hell, if Apple was really that ruthless in pushing people toward their newer devices, why not just restrict iOS 5 to the newest phone?
——RM
Not everything in IOS5 even works on the older phones. Again, Apple still has no incentive…