Apple has outed the iPhone 4S and some lucky ones have already started receiving their package. At the same time, a lot of reviewers have been playing with the iPhone 4S since a week or so. Some reviews are published while we expect many more to follow. Nothing much has changed in the iPhone 4S, same design, faster internals, adds Sprint in US and same model for Verizon and AT&T.
The innovative touch comes with iOS 5, out of which Siri – the personal voice assistant being limited to the iPhone 4S. Perhaps the only unique and striking feature in the 4S, Siri is now deeply integrated with the iPhone.
So how does Siri work? Well, reviews are good, but we would wait for a hands-on to comment on that. For now, we wonder why is Siri only limited to the iPhone 4S and there are a few probable answers to that. One simple thing can be that Apple wanted something to differentiate the iPhone 4S from the iPhone 4 and other iOS devices like iPad 2. This looks very much possible, if we look back the iPod touch camera is another thing that shows no logic for having a camera that is barely a mega-pixel for still photos.
Apple is known for such things. While Apple doesn’t comment on Siri issue, there can be doubts raised if the hardware support for Siri is not possible in iPhone 4 or iPod touch 4G, but then the iPad 2 has the same amount of RAM as the iPhone 4S and the A5 processor running at a higher clock speed. We would have surely loved to see Siri on the iPad 2. Counter argument may include notes like ‘the iPad 2 has multitouch gestures’ and adding Siri might not have been feasible. Yes that would be hard to believe!
Another good logic and something I could smell during the iPhone 4S presentation is the fact that Siri is in ‘Beta’. Apple doesn’t usually release a new feature in Beta. They did so with the iPhone 4S and perhaps they want to avoid the MobileMe like situation. As the entire lot of iPhone / iPod touch and iPad users would upgrade to iOS 5, Apple’s servers might get really busy serving Siri requests, a beta service that relies on an active data connection. It makes sense to try out Siri with a new hardware that would be out in limited numbers, say a few millions by end of the month and gradually scale up by year end. This is an acceptable argument.
But will Apple, sometime in the future, extend Siri to other iOS devices via a software upgrade?
Struck me when reading John Gruber’s iPhone 4S review on Daring Fireball