iPhone 4S is getting off to a shaky start with the celebrated Siri personal assistant now experiencing outage, following thousands of Apple users complaining of almost non-existent battery life on new device, earlier in the week.
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The Siri issues started at 11pm US Pacific Standard Time, Venture Beat reports.
And poor voice activated Siri has nothing to say except: “I’m sorry, I’m having trouble connecting to the network” (Well, it must be hard talking to millions every day).
However, no word if the outage has hit Australian iPhone 4S users yet.
Apple acknowledged this week an issue with iPhone 4S battery, blaming it on bugs, but said it only affected a “small number” of users.
The issue was believed to be associated with problem on Apple’s new iOS 5, which went live last month along with Apple celebrated Siri voice assistant.
“A small number of customers have reported lower than expected battery life on iOS 5 devices,” Apple said in a statement on Wednesday.
“We have found a few bugs that are affecting battery life and we will release a software update to address those in a few weeks.”
Mashable also confirmed the Siri outage on Twitter 3 hours ago “Apple iPhone Voice Assistant Goes Missing.”
Another miffed iPhone owner Tweeted: “Did Apple’s iPhone Voice Assistant Go Missing? Last 4 weeks, it never worked for me anyway!”
But this outage comes as another very interesting Siri development has emerged: a clever Irish hacker along with his San Francisco counterpart have managed to break into Apple’s voice PA security software, enabling it to run (almost fully) on the iPhone 4 and iPod Touch 4G.
Siri, an exclusive tool on the newly released iPhone 4S on iOS 5, was previously unable to be used on older Apple models including iPhone 4, to the despair of many.
The duo, Steve Troughton-Smith amd Grant Paul, pulled off this massive feat using Troughton-Smith’s code for the Siri port and software authentication tokens from a jailbroken iPhone 4S to trick Apple’s servers into thinking an iPhone 4 and an iPod touch 4G were actually an iPhone 4S, according to Gizmag.
The only feature the duo haven’t yet manged to pull off is “raise to speak”, which activates Siri when the phone is raised to the ear.
