Siri, Will You Work on My Old iDevices?

I think it’s safe to say that the iPhone 4S feature that has received the most attention is the virtual personal assistant Siri.

Just in case you haven’t heard, Siri uses voice-recognition technology to interpret requests and retrieve the best response. In some cases, the response may be an answer to a question such as “how much is five pounds in kilograms” (answer: about 2.27 kilograms). In others, Siri might launch an appropriate app or initiate a Web search to get the answer you need. And a lot of time has been spent asking Siri silly questions to see what sort of answers might pop up.

But one question that was unanswered until recently was if Siri would eventually migrate to older iPhone models or even the iPod Touch. Today, a man named Michael Steeber has an answer: nope. According to Steeber, a colleague wrote in to Apple to inquire about a special build of iOS that would include Siri but work on older devices. Apple’s response was in the negative — there are no plans to add Siri support to anything older than the iPhone 4S.

This isn’t exactly a shock. Siri sets the iPhone 4S apart from other iPhones. Since the iPhone 4S has the same form factor as the iPhone 4 and the other updates to the device may not capture the imaginations of potential customers the way Siri might, it makes sense to keep Siri exclusive to the newest iPhone. Why would Apple risk cannibalizing sales by extending Siri support to older devices?

For those of us who want to play with Siri but who don’t own an iPhone 4S, the news is a bit of a bummer. But as we upgrade to newer iOS devices we’ll likely have Siri on our side.

Read more at http://blogs.howstuffworks.com/2011/11/09/siri-will-you-work-on-my-old-iphone/