The major selling feature of the iPhone 4S, besides its speedy A5 processor and improved camera, is Siri, the cheeky smart voice assistant. For reasons currently unknown, though Apple insists it’s a hardware limitation, the iPhone 4 did not receive the feature with the iOS5 update that was released on Wednesday.
Now, an enterprising developer, Steve Troughton-Smith, revealed through Twitter and YouTube that he has been able to take the Siri files from an iPhone 4S and brute force them onto a jailbroken iPhone 4. A couple things stand in his way of making the transition seamless: for starters, Apple servers will not recognize any device that is not an iPhone 4. They likely saw this coming a mile away, and wanted to nip it in the bud before it got out of hand. His first attempt at the port disengaged the iPhone 4’s GPU drivers, meaning that everything on the device, including Siri, slowed to a crawl. On his second attempt, he fixed the glitch and now Siri activates like a charm, but can’t do its job.
At this point it’s not known whether jailbroken iPhone 4’s, and even 3GS’, will be able to actually use Siri in any meaningful way without the full endorsement of Apple, but it’s nice to see someone is diligently working at it on our behalf.
Source: 9to5 Mac
