Apple's claims that its new voice assistant, Siri, needs the dual-core processing power of the iPhone 4S have been disputed by an enterprising hacker.
Siri is one of the few new features of iOS 5 that have been withheld from owners of older iPhone handsets, with Apple claiming they don't have enough processing grunt to cope - even though the actual transcribing of voice commands is performed on Apple's servers, not the handset itself.
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However, the 9to5Mac blog has posted a video of Siri running on a jailbroken iPhone 4. The video shows the single-core iPhone 4 responding to Siri commands at exactly the same speed as the 4S, undermining Apple's claims, although it's not shown what impact running Siri on the iPhone 4 has on the handset's battery life.
The hacker got Siri running on the iPhone 4 by using "files from an iPhone 4S which aren’t ours to distribute".
"It also requires a validation token from the iPhone 4S that has to be pulled live from a jailbroken iPhone 4S, and it’s about a 20-step process right now," Steven Troughton-Smith told 9to5Mac.
Troughton-Smith also managed to get Siri running on a fourth-generation iPod touch, but claims the "the microphone on the iPod is nowhere near as good as the iPhone," meaning users have to raise the voices and speak much more clearly to make the voice assistant work on the device.
Although Apple is unlikely to reverse its position on porting Siri to older handsets and Troughton-Smith wants no part in distributing an illegal workaround, he says he has "no doubts that others will package this up and distribute it quasi-illegally, or try and sell it to people".
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