Siri gets ported to iPhone 4, gives you even fewer reasons to upgrade to the 4S

If you’re an iPhone 4 user who was contemplating upgrading to the iPhone 4S after watching the impressive Siri demo then you might want to hold on to your current phone a little longer. Because as it turns out you can make Siri work on the iPhone 4, sort of.

The hack you see below was performed by developer Steven Troughton-Smith who has been working for 9to5Mac to get Siri working on the iPhone 4. This was accomplished by copying the iPhone 4S Siri and Springboard files on to the iPhone 4.

The initial result of this transplant wasn’t quite impressive. The iPhone 4 become very sluggish to the point of being unusable because of a missing GPU driver for the iPhone 4. Siri itself wasn’t working too well as it could not access Apple’s servers because Apple’s servers can only authenticate requests from the iPhone 4S at the moment.

After a few hours’ work, however, the result was much more impressive. The iPhone 4 was now back to its snappy self, however, reaching Apple’s servers is still not possible.

Currently, Siri is partially usable on the iPhone 4 but fails to work whenever it has to access specific functions that require Apple’s servers. Having said that, this little hack proves that the iPhone 4 hardware is capable of running Siri, so the only reason to not have it enabled was to have some differentiating factor between the iPhone 4 and the iPhone 4S, other than the improved hardware and camera.

9to5Mac is continuing to work on the port and will hopefully release it to others soon.

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