Dev gets an exclusive iPhone 4S feature running on non-supported hardware

Oct 17, 2011 08:35 GMT  ·  By

An iPhone 4S-exclusive feature, Siri has been ported to iPhone 4 hardware by a developer working exclusively with a Mac-centric blog to show that Apple is somewhat intentionally blocking the function on older devices to get people to buy the latest iPhone.

According to developer Steven Troughton-Smith, installing the iPhone 4S Siri and Springboard files onto an iPhone 4 was all it took to get the personal assistant up and running on the iPhone 4 model.

The developer, working with 9to5mac to exclusively showcase his port, made two demonstration videos, one showing Siri working very sluggishly, the other, much smoother (after a little more work). Both videos are embedded in this article below.

As the footage shows, Siri can recognize spoken commands in both standard and Dictation views (although the developer doesn’t actually speak anything to Siri).

However, even if fully ported to the iPhone 4, and perhaps other old-generation devices, Apple does not authenticate commands to its servers, meaning Siri will only answer back using what is stored locally.

The service mostly works by talking to the servers, which is where Siri works up its smart answers for the user.

According to the blog, the issue is not Siri itself, but a driver that is missing from the iPhone 4 GPU.

The iPhone 4 graphics processor is housed inside the A4 SoC, which also contains the CPU and the RAM.

The A4 is reportedly powerful enough to handle Siri, which means there’s no real reason why the assistant wouldn’t work well on the iPhone 4, thus spurring speculation that Apple is intentionally blocking the feature.

But with no apparent technical roadblocks, Apple may have some justified reasons not to allow Siri on older hardware. One of them may be battery life. Another may be that the iPhone 4S boasts a different (better) microphone.

Who’s to say Siri would’t act up on the iPhone 4 in the long run? After all, one antennagate fiasco is enough for one device generation.

Siri ported to iPhone 4 (work in progress)

Siri fully enabled on the iPhone 4