Siri now flirting with older iPhones--for real
Developers are getting closer to finding a way to get Apple's iPhone 4S exclusive Siri voice assistant feature working on older iPhones, iPods, and iPads.
Siri's exclusivity on the iPhone 4S may not be long for this world. At least unofficially.
Efforts to get the new software feature working on older Apple devices, including the iPhone 4 and iPod Touch, seem to have pushed past the biggest hurdle: slipping by Apple's security.
Over the weekend, Apple tracking blog 9to5mac posted a video of the software feature working smoothly on an iPhone 4, courtesy of Irish iPhone hacker Steve Troughton-Smith. That follows a demonstration from earlier this month where Troughton-Smith showed the software installed, but unable to run queries on an iPhone 4.
In an interview over the weekend, Troughton-Smith told 9to5mac that the working version of the hack runs on multiple devices, including Apple's fourth-generation iPod Touch. The feat was accomplished using "files from an iPhone 4S," that he said "aren't ours to distribute," alongside "a validation token from the iPhone 4S that has to be pulled live from a jailbroken iPhone 4S."
In other words, there are some things going on behind the scenes that Apple won't like, and could very well move to block if a working hack takes off, but the key takeaway is that there are seemingly no hardware hurdles standing in the way.
Here's a video of it working on an iPhone 4 with Troughton-Smith's workaround in place: