More progress seen in porting Siri to 'older' Apple devices

With Apple Inc. still restricting voice-activated assistant Siri to its new iPhone 4S, developers remain hard at work to bring it to other Apple devices. Developers iH8sn0w and Jack (@Jackoplane), and beta tester Joshua Tucker, are working to port Siri to an iPhone 4 and an even earlier iPhone 3GS. "Currently, the port is being tested on an iPhone 4. However, the end goal is to port Siri to all devices. Right now, we can not make any promises to when those will be, however the iPhone 3GS is looking promising for the next step," they said. They said they are writing the code from the ground up for performance purposes and to avoid copyright infringement. They hinted this work may take "weeks." However, the catch —as expected— is that a non-iPhone 4S must be jailbroken, or modified to accept unauthorized apps, to use the port. Connecting to Apple servers The developers said the trick to using Siri on non-iPhone 4S devices is to fool Apple's servers into thinking the device is an iPhone 4S. "(W)e have to intercept the data that is being exchanged between devices to initially 'trick' Apple’s servers into thinking that the device is authorized. So, imagine that what we have setup is a middle man," they said. But they hinted hosting a particular server to intercept data between Apple's servers and a non-iPhone 4S "will cost money and will be the venue for all users to use Siri without an iPhone 4S." On the other hand, they voiced doubts that Siri could not run on older devices because of hardware limitations. "There is nothing special about the 4S that makes it so that Siri can only work on that chip. Nothing is hardware accelerated in regards to Siri," they said. Practical reasons? However, tech site Mashable said Apple's restriction could be a matter of practicality. "By only working on the iPhone 4S, Apple has more control over how well Siri can scale from the cloud. When Siri first launched alongside the iPhone 4S, some users reported periods of instability — thanks to a rush of users flooding the service — and the cloud," it said. "Now multiply that impact by the 50 million iPhone 4 devices. It could be that Apple wants to restrict Siri until it can be sure it will support the load," it added. — TJD, GMA News