Developer Steven Troughton-Smith has been working with 9to5Mac exclusively to port the iPhone 4S Siri voice command system to the iPhone 4. Troughton-Smith was able to get the beginning steps of a full port rolling after installing the iPhone 4S Siri and Springboard files onto an iPhone 4. As you can see in the video, Siri’s interface loads up with all the features from the iPhone 4S implementation.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pue5Yl3WrZA&feature=player_embedded

I picked up my co-founder, Evan Kirchhoff, in San Francisco mid-morning and we drove up to the Marin Best Buy. He had good experiences with short lines there in the past during Apple product launches and it was also a chance for us to test the newest build of Mobimileage. He was a little worried since all the Best Buys opened at 7 am that morning in anticipation of a rush on the Verizon iPhone.

We got there around 11, there were about 9 people in the mobile portion of the store- 5 of them were employees, and 2 couples. An employee walked up to us immediately and asked what we were looking for and we asked, somewhat apprehensively, “Do you have Verizon iPhones left?”, thinking the lack of lines was because they had sold out hours ago.

He said, “Sure, no problem.” and started the process of getting us set up.

An hour later, after transferring all of my information off the HTC EVO on to the new iPhone, we were on our way back to San Francisco.

Two days later I also visited the Verizon Store and the Apple Store on University (here’s the backstory) and asked if launch day on February 10 was crazy- both said there was a little crowd of a few dozen people in the morning when they first opened followed by a steady trickle of 1-2  every few minutes. No one had sold out of the phones.

On the whole, it seems the Verizon iPhone launch has been successful but not the frenzy that some people were expecting. It could be that most people who wanted the phone on the first day ordered the Verizon iPhone online. My AT&T friends whose contracts are not up don’t seem to be in a rush to pay $500+ to switch.  There is still a healthy demand for the Verizon iphone on ebay and craigslist, but not the insane prices we saw when the 3G and 4 first came out.  However, most informal reports from the field seem to indicate that Verizon and Apple guessed almost spot on what the demand would be.  Although I have not heard of a store selling out, I have heard often that they are low on stocks.

So far, I’m enjoying the call quality and in a side-by-side comparison with my co-founder’s AT&T iPhone, the signal strength does not show significant difference.

Follow me on Twitter @chiah.

Ars Technica

Engadget

CNET

Techcrunch – cant find a link, but you KNOW they will be there

There are other sources, but I just grabbed these quickly.  I do not think there is much news left to know except two things….

Pricing: I’m sure Verizon has something up their sleeves to make people like me jump from AT&T.  Something interesting I read is that included in the $30 a month for data is 5g of ‘tethered’ data.  Now if that is true, I’m there.

CDMA or G4?  Right now we are all thinking its going to be CDMA which is a bit slower then AT&T’s network, but much faster then NO network.  But if its going on the new 4G network, then all bets are off…. except I most likely rush out to get it depending on a few jailbreak questions on how data is exposed to the iOS.

Well, it looks like the good people from the dev-team have updated the jailbreak and have sorted out the MMS and Facetime problems.  From the site..

For those needing a carrier unlock, use the existing ultrasn0w in Cydia on your iPhone3G or iPhone3GS.  After a short testing period, we’ll push out the iPhone4 version.

Note: The earlier MMS and Facetime issues have been fixed.  If you already ran the version with those problems, launch Cydia and accept its offer to update.

So there you go kiddies, and remember, just because its legal now doesn’t mean Apple is happy about all this and they can still decide at any moment that you are breaking the warranty on the device if you jailbreak.  But again, I have yet to have any issues when I bring my iphone in to Apple store for a fix.  And this is normally because I cannot get my Mac at home to do it myself on the VERY rare occasions I have had an issue…   Ok like, ONCE in the whole time I’ve been jailbreaking since iphone 2.

Wrong, your missing the point Steve,

Its about the caucus reply to the issue by saying your holding it wrong. If you were to admit right up front that this is a issue and we did not expect it to be that bad, and then offer a free case ‘to anyone that asked’ (not every phone owner) odds are this would have been a non issue and we would all go back to complaining about bluetooth.  But no.

Instead you said we were all holding the phone wrong.  That is what antennagate is really about. So now, you have to buy EVERYONE a new case.  (Cant keep Oprah voice out of my head).  If you would have said, yes that is an issue and anyone that asks can come into the Apple store and get a free case.  Odds are only 30% of the iphone owners would bother because either they did not have the issue or the standard bumper would not appeal.  Ah well.

So there you go kiddies. If you have a iphone4 you will either be sent a case or you can go into the Apple store and request a case of they cannot produce enough bumpers. Well know about the request part fairly soon. Also, if you bought a case, you will get a refund.

One more note, this is only going to happen up to Sept 30.  After that?  who knows.

Seems like it may be neither based on what I have heard so far… based on how you hold the phone.

In general, the antenna is bigger and on the outside of the phone.  So right off you would think that reception would be better, and thus fewer dropped calls unless holding your hard around the antenna causes issues, which I wrote about a few days back on my post called ‘Will the iphone 4 with the new antenna layout reduce dropped calls?’ and its seems my concerns around attenuation have been confirmed with this video that went out yesterday.  (video at the bottom of the post)

Now here is the fun part.  Steve Jobs answered back an email on this subject and he’s replay was basically, do  not hold it in a way to reduces reception or put it in a case.  Sigh.  Great.  So I have to wonder… did anyone TEST for this? 

If you have been trying to order the new iphone 4, I’m sure you have been frustrated with the errors messages you have been getting back from AT&T.

“There was a problem with your request,” the error message reads. “P1015: We’re sorry, but we are experiencing a system error that prevents us from completing your request….

Which begs the question, is there REALLY that much demand, that Apple and AT&T just cannot keep up?  The first reports I say coming over Twitter, when twitter was up, seemed to point to insane demand.  Then as time when on, the arrow moved from ‘too much demand’ to ‘AT&T AGAIN was simply not prepared’.  Remember when the first iphone came out?  I do.  You could go to Apple and pick up a phone (when the lines went down) but its was anyone’s guess if you could get it to register with AT&T.

So here we are a few years later and STILL AT&T cannot seem to predict and deal with demand.  What is it with these guys???  They already have a reputation for dropping calls (mostly in area’s with difficult coverage and high demand usage), heck even John Stewart bangs on AT&T now. So the fact that again, failure is hanging on AT&T neck just propagates the reputation of AT&T not being able to support a network with high demand.

</rant>

Now to be fair, the Twitter Fail Whale has been spotted more times the moby-dick on the last few days, so its not like AT&T is alone in this regard, but then again, I do not depend on Twitter for my phone calls.

Now do not go a downloading yet.  They still need to streamline a few things and unless you found an iphone 4 in a bar somewhere, you do not have it anyway, so wait for the official release. You can find that here. Now of course, the normal warnings apply, when you jailbreak, you are taking your phones life in your own hands, so be careful and backup before doing ANYTHING.

So I have to ask myself something here.  Really, just how hard is Apple trying to keep this thing locked?  I once hypothesized that Apple was only trying just so hard to keep the OS locked down because some of the coolest features on the iphone (which is why I started the top 10 list in the first place) seem to come to the jailbreak phones first.  Remember video?  Yea, we had that LONG before the non jailbreakers.  Custom themes?  STILL only on jailbreak.

BTW, on a completely unrelated note, we just finished a silly comic on the rise, fall and rebirth of Apple.  Check it out.

Now, check out the Video below..