Hacker ‘chpwn’ introduced Spire a few days ago, his own unique hack to get Siri on older, jailbroken iPhones and unlike previous Siri ports, this one is completely legal and free of any copyrighted binaries. Unfortunately, it’s not very useful to most consumers, since it requires a bit of technical work. Here’s the process.
Spire is available in Cydia, so yes your iPhone has to be jailbroken to get access. During installation, Spire downloads Siri directly from Apple. Chpwn points out that the download consumes around 100 MB of data, so you’re better off connecting to WiFi before beginning.
Here’s where it gets a bit more difficult. After that, Apple’s lock on Siri means you’ll have to authorize it somehow before you can use it. Spire prompts you to enter in your own proxy address. How you’ll obtain one is the main struggle — he actually suggests buying an iPhone 4S (which would more than likely defeat the purpose of this hack) or consult a friend who owns an iPhone 4S.
For those of you with a good amount of experience and the resources in place, congratulations, Siri is all yours to use with or without Apple’s approval. There’s still no plausible solution for regular consumers who just want Siri on their older devices, so until then, we’ll just have to settle for Chpwn’s workaround.
[via CNET]