No Siri on iPhone 4?

Now lots of old iPhone (iPhone 4, iPhone 3GS, even iPod touch) users are hoping that they could be able to get hands onto Apple’s new personal assistant feature Siri sometime in the near future without having to upgrade the phone.

Siri is a personal assistant application for iOS. The application uses natural language processing to answer questions, make recommendations, and perform actions by delegating requests to an expanding set of web services.

According to the report of Techland, an iPhone user recently asked one staff of Apple if there were any plans to release Siri as a paid upgrade to older iPhones. However, the Apple representative quickly shut the idea down.

“Engineering has provided the following feedback regarding this issue,” the rep said. “Siri only works on iPhone 4S and we currently have no plans to support older devices.”

It is said that that Siri needs the right work environment to be effective, and Apple is famously obsessive about the quality of its user experience.

“Siri is processor intensive and the 4S is likely the minimum it will reliably run on,” said Rob Enderle, principle technology analyst at Enderle Group. “They will carry it forward, I doubt they will push it back.”

The iPhone 4S has a dual-core, A5 processor that Apple says delivers twice the processing power of the iPhone 4’s A4.

Enderle also noted that Siri on an iPhone 4 would decrease the rationale for an upgrade.

“In the end, Apple is in the business of getting people to buy new hardware,” Enderle said. “They have little incentive to upgrade old hardware anyway.” dvd to ipod converter iphone ringtone maker