Siri, is she all she's cracked up to be?

I upgraded to an iPhone 4S predominantly because I saw Siri as a great way around my MS symptoms when having a bad day, because on those days my nerves and muscles combine to make my left hand feel very weak and tired. Therefore making holding my phone while I type quite hard work. My thinking was along the lines of Siri doing my typing for me when I'm not feeling up to it.

So, unboxed my shiny new (white!) 64Gb iPhone, set it all up, re-logged in to all of my readers, social network apps, etc and proceeded to ask Siri banal questions such as "what is the meaning of life?" (It took me about 10 tries before I got an answer that involves chocolate, I still haven't heard 42 yet!). I learned how to give her instructions so that my text message recipients got something that made sense.

Everything seemed just brilliant, and what was a big bonus - whoever programmed Siri definitely had a sense of humor!

Until I returned to work. I sparked Siri up as I was driving along in my dump truck and remembered something I needed to do later on that I would forget if I didn't set myself a reminder right now! Imagine my dismay as I received the message "Siri not available, connect to the Internet".

HUH???? I don't need to connect to the Internet, I don't need a search performed or a message sent - I just want to remind myself to do something later. What about that needs an Internet connection? Apparently Siri herself does. Which may also explain why I went over my data limit on my phone account in less than a week that first few days I had my shiny new phone.

I work in a very remote part of Western Australia - for two weeks out of three I live and work on a mine site where digital tv hasn't even been heard of, let alone cell phone service! We have Wi-Fi piped around camp and the site offices but that's it for my style of communication.

Even when we're at home our "broadband" is rubbish and only works with any speed sporadically. I've stated in a previous rant how that affects Apple software update downloads - hopefully iOS 5 lives up to the hype and those days are now gone.

But seriously Siri, what's up?? Why so dependent on an Internet connection? I guess I should have been a little wary when I downloaded Dragon Dictate and had the same result. If anyone knows of a dictation type program that doesn't require internet access to function can they let me know in the comments?