iPhone News Updated

Foxconn to expand iPhone production facility, set to become world’s largest

Apple supplier Foxconn is preparing to build what will become the world’s largest smartphone manufacturing plant in the world at a cost of just over $1 billion.

With Apple’s iPhone recently coming to market in 21 more countries and the likely launch of a new smartphone model from the Cupertino company in 2012, it may come as little surprise that Apple supplier Foxconn is planning to expand its Zhengzhou production facility in China, a move that will make it the biggest smartphone manufacturing plant in the world.

A China Daily report (via Apple Insider) says Foxconn will double the size of its factory, situated in central China’s Henan province, at a cost of just over $1 billion.

The expansion will see Foxconn increase the number of production lines at the facility to 95, with the aim of bringing in $20 billion in sales revenue in 2012.

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New workaround helps keep Siri running on jailbroken iPhone 4

Jailbreak hacker “chpwn” has developed a new tool that helps iPhone 4 users run Siri, Apple’s mobile “personal assistant,” on jailbroken devices. His new software, called Spire, claims to avoid copyright issues associated with earlier Siri hacks and improves privacy by allowing users to specify their own proxy server to handle communication between an iPhone 4 and Apple’s servers.

Apple still considers Siri a beta feature, so it’s possible that Apple wanted to reduce the number of variables in testing the service by having it run on a single platform—i.e. the iPhone 4S. Despite this, iOS hackers were able to reverse engineer how Siri communicates with Apple’s servers for the necessary speech-to-text conversion and get it running on an iPhone 4.

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