Since the launch of the iPhone 4S and the introduction of Siri, I have read many accusations that Apple has restricted Siri to the new model to help boost sales. Considering that much of the heavy lifting—like speech processing—is handled in the cloud, and the fact that Siri has been successfully ported to the iPhone 4, the assumed A5 hardware requirement started to fizzle. According to an article on AllThingsD, Siri’s iPhone 4S exclusivity really does look like a selling point:

Sterne Agee analyst Shaw Wu says his latest checks with industry and supply chain sources show broad sales strength across Apple’s entire iPhone portfolio, but most of all for the 4S. Evidently lots of folks who could be spending $99 on the iPhone 4 are opting to fork over another $100 for the 4S — and a lot of them are doing it for Siri.

“Despite global macroeconomic headwinds, Apple continues to defy conventional wisdom with a higher-end product mix,” Wu says. “Talking to industry sources, what’s driving the 4S is better than expected reception of its new Siri software.”

It may also be possible that Apple plans to roll out Siri to the iPhone 4 at a later date. For the initial rollout, Apple may have labelled Siri “Beta” and restricted its user base size solely to ensure their infrastructure could handle the demand. Once Apple establishes confidence in the service, they may very well open up Siri for the iPhone 4 and move it from beta to gold master.

The legal battle Down Under between Samsung and Apple continues, with Samsung now requesting access to the iPhone 4S’s firmware, as well as Apple’s agreements with Australia’s major carriers. From Smart Office:

In Federal court today Samsung counsel Cynthia Cochrane said her client would need the source code for the iPhone 4S and agreements Apple had with major carriers Vodafone, Telstra and Optus in order to make a legal case for a ban before the court.

Apple denies the infringement, claiming they have licensed the three RAND patents from Samsung through an international agreement, which Samsung claims was not extended to Australia.

According to 9to5Mac, Hulu Plus is ready to be deployed on the Apple TV, but Apple has yet to green light the implementation:

While there are no technical issues standing in the way of the Hulu Plus release on Apple TV, there appear to be some political ones. At some level at Apple, there appears to be some consideration that the Hulu Plus app could eat into iTunes TV sales on the Apple TV. Where Netflix tends to run older programming, iTunes is the Apple TV’s only outlet for current TV programming.

There is a workaround: iPad 2 and iPhone 4S users running iOS 5 can use AirPlay to mirror the Hulu Plus app content on their 2nd generation Apple TVs. One limitation of this method is only standard definition (SD)—not high definition (HD)—video will be mirrored to your television.

As for content licensing, I wouldn’t be surprised to find that only part of the web-accessible catalog is available on the Apple TV, much like what we have seen with the iOS apps and PS3. You may see this disclaimer more often than you would like to admit:

We currently don’t have the rights to make this show available on TV or mobile devices — request to be notified if it becomes available in Hulu Plus.

The once proprietary Apple Lossless Audio Codec (ALAC) is now open source and available under the Apache license. From the Mac OS Forge page:

The Apple Lossless Audio Codec (ALAC) is an audio codec developed by Apple and supported on iPhone, iPad, most iPods, Mac and iTunes. ALAC is a data compression method which reduces the size of audio files with no loss of information. A decoded ALAC stream is bit-for-bit identical to the original uncompressed audio file.

The Apple Lossless Audio Codec project contains the sources for the ALAC encoder and decoder. Also included is an example command line utility, called alacconvert, to read and write audio data to/from Core Audio Format (CAF) and WAVE files. A description of a ‘magic cookie’ for use with files based on the ISO base media file format (e.g. MP4 and M4A) is included as well.

If you were always curious of its inner-workings, head on over and dig into the source code.

Are you looking to pick up a new Android phone, but concerned that your phone may never see an OS update moving forward? If history repeats itself, there’s a good chance your Android phone will stop receiving updates within two-years, in contrast to the iPhone which receives OS updates for the first three-years. Michael DeGusta posted an analysis of existing Android and iPhone models, and mapped out when their installed OS was current or outdated. From a simple glance, it is obvious the iPhone is easily the most supported and phones from Motorola are the most neglected.