Some iPhone users had a burning question to ask the device's much-vaunted personal voice assistant application on Thursday: "Why aren't you working?"
What they got back were bland answers such as "Sorry, I am having trouble connecting to the network," and "I can't answer questions right now. " A rising star featured in 4S commercials and darling of the mobile world, the female-voiced Siri can be forgiven for needing a day off.
Overworked?
With as many as 5 million of Apple's newest smartphones sold since their early October launch, users have been sending queries fast and furious, such as "what's the weather?" and "where is Puss N' Boots playing?" Those queries evidently have been inundating Apple's cloud servers, which translate the words into data and send responses.
An outage of new technology isn't unusual. Last month Research In Motion's servers for its BlackBerry messaging and data systems went down for several days across a wide geographic area, and Verizon Wireless faced an embarrassing shutdown of its long-term evolution, high-speed data network in April just four months after it launched.
"This is not that big, yet," said Ramon Llamas, a wireless analyst for IDC Research.
On the scale of recent Apple snafus, he said, last year's Antennagate, in which iPhone users complained about reception problems stemming from the iPhone 4's unique double-band antenna, takes the cake, while the connectivity issues with AT&T's network rank second.
"Having Siri break down is a distant third, because you can still use your phone," Llamas said. "It's something people are addicted to and something for Apple to address but it's not insurmountable. When you get right down to it, it's still very new, still a beta, so it's going to have some teething pain."
Indeed, the problem seemed to be fixed by Friday, although it did come on the heels of a battery issue for the 4S and other devices running iOS 5, with Apple admitting that "a small number of customers have reported lower than expected battery life on iOS 5 devices," according to a statement to The Wall Street Journal's AllThingsD blog. A software update will soon fix the bugs, Apple said.
Llamas said the battery issue could be addressed by users by going to the settings control and turning off applications running in the background. "You'll be able to tack on at least a day," the analyst said.
Those are not the only issues for the 4S: Some complained on a user forum on Apple's Web site last month that their screens had a yellowish tint, a phenomenon that seems to only affect the white version of the device. Others responded that it had been a problem with Apple devices before, and was caused by a resin that bonds the screen together not drying completely. The tint should disappear over time, they said.
Ready for Prime Time
Does Apple run the risk of being viewed as rushing out products with kinks to iron out without sufficient testing?
"If anything, Apple is very meticulous about releasing things when they are ready for prime time," Llamas said. "The 4S was not rushed, but this is the first time artificial intelligence has been put in front of consumers. There are going to be some problems."
The question, he said, is what will happen if the problems persist. "What recourse will people have?" he asked.
The Siri hiccup comes as Canadian research firm Canaccord Genuity said that Apple took in fully 52 percent of the wireless industry's operating profit in the third quarter, though its market share was only 4.2 percent.
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