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.

Meanwhile I can't work out how to get Navigate to recognise names from my address book. The names aren't that screwy! But voice recognition comes back with celebrity names before my contacts. It's pretty decent at taking dictation of English, but speaking a text or email is a luxury. Asking for directions is more important.

I have a question for those of you who are using Pinboard: when the red flares first went up about Delicious, I imported my bookmarks from Delicious to Diigo, looking for a safer harbor. My links and tags came through the transition okay, but I tend towards long descriptions and my descriptions were truncated (Delicious allows up to 1000 characters -- as does Diigo -- but Diigo cut off all the imported Descriptions at 256 characters.) Any new descriptions can be 1000 characters long, but all my old bookmarks are chopped off. That was 10 months ago, and I opened a bug ticket (as well as loads of other people) but they haven’t offered any kind of solution and I don’t want to have to go back and edit each entry individually.

So, my question is, did Pinboard have this kind of issue? When you imported your bookmarks, did everything – links, tags, and the full description – come through?

Because the New Delicious makes me want to knock my head into the wall, and I really, really want to find something else to use.

Morgana,

Pinboard has a money back guarantee if you contact him within x amount of days (maybe 2?) so you could get an account, import and if you don't like it, get your $$ back.

I have been using pinboard for 1-2 months and I really love it. I also love because it works with ifttt.com.