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A5 Mystery Solved (Why Siri Won't Run On iPhone 4)
Hugh Pickens writes "Anna Leach reports that Siri support has been a contentious issue for owners of earlier iPhones, but a recent filing from Audience shows that Siri won't run on the iPhone 4 because the phone's chip can't handle it. Linley Gwennap of the Linley Group cracked one of the secrets of the new iPhone's A5 chip after working out that it packs some serious audio cleaning power not available on the iPhone 4's A4 chip. Audience has developed technology that removes most or all of the background noise when someone places a cell-phone call from a restaurant, airport, or other noisy location. The iPhone 4S integrates Audience's 'EarSmart' technology directly into the A5 processor, improving its technology to handle 'far-field speech,' which means holding the device at arm's length rather than directly in front of the mouth. Apple has also licensed the Audience technology for a 'new generation of processor IP,' which may mean that the forthcoming A6 processor will appear in the iPad 3 and iPhone 5. 'Why Apple has not simply purchased Audience is unclear. An acquisition would prevent Audience's other major customer, Samsung, from using the technology to compete with Apple,' says Gwennap. 'The company may be hedging its bets, as it could switch to Qualcomm's Fluence noise-reduction technology in the future.'"
Or at least not the whole story. It has been shown already that a jailbroken iPhone 4 can run Siri just fine.
Large print giveth, and the small print taketh away
improving its technology to handle 'far-field speech,' which means holding the device at arm's length rather than directly in front of the mouth
I thought cell phone users were annoying enough when they constantly raised their voice as if the other end were deaf; now people are going to be yelling at their phones from across the room.
Orwell: "In a Time of Universal Deceit, telling the Truth is a Revolutionary Act"
I always assumed the answer was something to the effect of:
boolean siriEnabled() {
return (system.cpu.version >= 5.0);
}
Is anything else really needed? They don't want to support it on older models so you have to buy the new one. Conversely, if you really want the feature, buy the latest phone. Personally I find Siri an overhyped piece of junk. I have a 4S and I disabled it because it kept getting activated randomly and rarely understood my commands. Plus for the basic stuff like weather, I can just open the app. The anecdotal crap like "Will I need an umbrella today?" is just a dumb gimmick to me. But anyway, the fact is that the 4S is really an incremental improvement over the 4, and Siri is the one feature Apple can point to on the 4S as a differentiator, so they enforce that differentiation.
rooooar
Possibly true: Siri uses a unique feature of the iPhone 4S.
False: Siri won't run on the iPhone 4
Siri runs just fine on jailbroken a iPhone 4, and it ran just fine on an iPhone 4 Before apple removed it. Kudos to the authors for enhancing Siri to use new features of the A5 chip. Good job to the researcher who figured this out. But shame on anyone who uses this as FUD to make Apple look like they didn't cripple their own product to force people to upgrade.
There is already a dozen comments or so about how the article is wrong because Siri works on a jailbroken iPhone 4. That was never the point of the article. We know that it will work because of the jailbreaks. The question is why Apple didn't allow it to work on the 4. The article suggests a hardware limitation in that while the A4 chip can run Siri it lacks the much better audio processing the A5 has to remove background noise. Design wise this means that the Siri was meant to be used at a distance instead of always next to user's mouth. Also this means the 4S should be able to handle noise better. This is speculation but a reasonable one as I can see Apple not releasing a feature for quality reasons even if people disagree it is really a valid reason for them.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
"'Why Apple has not simply purchased Audience is unclear."
Perhaps it's because Audience doesn't want to be bought? Even without Siri, it sounds like that tech would be useful in EVERY SINGLE PHONE - would make conversations a bit easier in noisy locations.
Audience probably figures that by broadly licensing the tech to every phone company in the world, they'll make MORE MONEY that Apple would be willing to offer them. At least, they might be betting on it.
Still does not explain why siri will not work on my ipad 2.