Siri on iPhone 4? Here’s a Reason It’s Not Meant to Officially Happen

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We’ve all seen the footage, we know Siri works on the iPhone 4, the iPhone 3GS, the iPod touch 4G and the iPad, but we also know that Apple will not offer official Siri support for older iOS devices, despite testing the assistant on them.

When we first heard Siri was going to be an iPhone 4S exclusive feature we thought the virtual assistant is not compatible with the hardware of older devices. But we were only considering processor speed and RAM, which turned out to be an incorrect supposition. Siri can run on older devices, as developers have already shown us, although some of these devices, such as the iPod touch 4G or the iPhone 3GS may offer a poorer Siri performance than the iPhone 4.

Today we hear that indeed there may be a hardware feature that prevents Apple from offering Siri support to iPhone 4S predecessors, but not one we would have thought of. Apparently the new smartphone has a revamped IR sensor that allows it to sense when the user raises the handset in order to potentially issue orders for Siri.

The “Raise to Speak” Siri options basically lets the user raise the phone to his or her ear and initiate Siri queries and therefore the sensor always checks to see whether your face is near or not. The iPhone 4’s proximity sensor will not allow such feature and such minor hardware differences may be enough for Apple to cancel any iPhone 4 Siri plans. The same thing goes for iPads or even older iPhones and iPod touches.

Teardown experts iFixit revisited the IR sensor of the iPhone 4S, and there’s a video available below to show their findings. Here’s what they said on the matter:

Now that the teardown is wrapped up, we’ve re-opened the mystery and made a neat discovery about the 4S: that black component is an infrared LED, and the little bugger almost always wants to know if you’re nearby.

It’s no innovation for the iPhone to integrate an infrared proximity sensor. In iPhones past, the IR proximity sensors would only switch on when a phone or Skype call was initiated. The sensor could detect that a face was near and then smartly dim the display / kill the keyboard, and then resume normal activity once it detected the face was not in close proximity anymore.

The 4S, however, has a neurotic tendency of always wondering how close your face is. As long as the screen is activated, that IR sensor will be shining brightly (though you wouldn’t know it, unless you’re a snake, fish, mosquito, or cheap digital camera).

Could this little thing make the difference between a Siri-enabled device and one that won’t ever get to meet the official assistant? Not to mention that the microphones on older iDevices may not be suitable for Siri action. And while we’re asking questions that Apple won’t answer too soon, could the hyperactive sensor be responsible for extra battery loss too?

What about you, iPhone 4 users, would you use Siri on your devices knowing that you’ll never be able to use the “Raise to Speak” function properly?