So who has the 4S? I'm curious about the utility of Siri. I want to wrap my head around the paradigm they're trying to introduce above and beyond mere voice commands and snarky answers.

Apparently some Android developers went off and wrote Iris, but I don't see the point. It's pretty impressive that they wrote it in a day, but so far Voice Actions has provided me with more information, and the voice dialer more utility.

I've got a 4S and I'm finding Siri very good, I also feel like I'm just scratching the surface. I've used it in my car to have it read and respond to text messages. It's awesome for setting alarms while I'm on the road, I just reach over, hit one button and say "Wake me up at 7:30 tomorrow morning" and I've got an alarm set. I've also started using it to schedule meetings. Setting one for tomorrow was as easy as saying "I'm meeting with Susan tomorrow morning at 10:30"

I loved Siri on my Iphone 4 before the service was taken away from us!

I've used voice activation before, my last two cars have had voice control, and the big difference with Siri is that you aren't forced to work within a rigid syntax to get it to work. So far it seems very flexible in parsing a simple sentence and turning it into useful data to be acted upon.

I've barely used Siri, but the little I've tried is pretty slick. Training me to think to use it seems like the biggest hurdle. Actually using it is so very easy.

Eta it's the natural language that seems like the big breakthrough.

Yeah, the commands you're using, Noise, seem really cool and natural. Pretty sure no one has gotten there for Android yet.

What's the rationale behind taking it away from existing users? Apart from being big meanie pants, that is.

The official line is that the version on the 4S is improved over the previous version and that it needs the extra power of the faster processor in the 4S to work smoothly. Your guess is as good as mine if that's really the case or if they are using it as a way to push people to buy the newer hardware. I never used the old version so I don't have a basis for comparison.

I suspect that after the iOS 4 running poorly on iPhone 3G hardware debacle a while back Apple is very cautious about releasing anything that won't run really smoothly on the intended hardware.

Siri was a third party app, then it was bought out by Apple, and integrated into iOS. It's only on the 4S so that Apple can sell new phones, and/or the old iPhones aren't powerful enough computationally.

But why can't the old phones use what was apparently good enough before? It's the retroactive but that I don't get.

yeah, I'm not particularly happy about it. Note: Siri before did not have all the capability of the current one, but it was pretty good.

Now, I have Vlingo with a google calendar address book hack to do what I used Siri for (asking Siri to remind me of something at x time while I was driving).

I also use Dragon Go for the other functions Siri used to do.