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Siri still has plenty of tricks up her sleeve. According to the German website Macerkopf.de, iOS 5.1 will enable Siri to control your iPhone's hardware by the end of this year. This should allow Siri to do more than tell you where the nearest coffee shop is located by giving the voice assistant more control over your device.

If true, iPhone 4S users will be able to ask Siri to do things like shoot video, or turn off their Bluetooth when they get home from the office. Macerkopf.de isn't known for the most accurate iPhone predictions, but Apple needs to do something to make Siri more useful. I know the novelty of the voice assistant has worn off for some.

If you're considering jailbreaking your iPhone for the first time, you should know there is an iPhone 4S jailbreak in the works, but it's not available to the general public yet, and it will be free. You should also know Apple is not a fan of jailbreaking, so it's never going to be available as an app in the iTunes App Store.

Apple recently pulled a $9.99 app by RiliSoft because it tricked people into believing it could jailbreak the iPhone 4S and iPad 2. The app cleverly named "Jailbreak" is actually a game, but Apple didn't like the way it tricked its users. You can see how the app's description mislead people from the screen shot taken by GottaBeMobile posted below.

Now you can set up shortcuts to your favorite iPhone Settings right on your iOS home screen without jailbreaking. One tap of the right icon will bring you directly to the Settings item you want to change without any more navigating through multiple menus. The solution shown here is not only free, but it does not require jailbreaking.

To begin, you must have iOS 5 installed on your device. These shortcuts are actually Web Clips delivered to your iPhone in a MobileConfig file. Some of the toggles will change the desired setting immediately, while others are not true toggles, but immediately open the correct Settings page. Jailbreakers familiar with the tweak SBSettings have enjoyed this functionality for some time.

Even after Apple released iOS 5.0.1 to address complaints about iPhone battery life issues, people are still experiencing unexpected battery drain. What originally seemed like a few isolated incidents on Friday, has grown into a pile of new complaints on the Apple support forums. Some iPhone 4S owners are claiming iOS 5.0.1 did nothing to fix their battery problems.

Apple responded to the new complaints by releasing a brief statement to AllThingsD.

“The recent iOS software update addressed many of the battery issues that some customers experienced on their iOS 5 devices. We continue to investigate a few remaining issues.”

Those always reliable "industry sources" must be feeling lonely since the Apple rumor mill was shutdown back in October. Good thing for them the iPhone 4S wasn't interesting enough to hold our attention for longer than a month. So grab your supply of salt, and prepare yourself, because I predict a very long winter of new Apple rumors.

The latest comes from the Business Insider, who refuses let a great rumor die. According to their unnamed source, the iPhone 5 was very real, but it was abandoned 3 months before the iPhone 4S was announced. Their tipster didn't say why the iPhone 5 was scrapped, but he did say Apple engineers thought "a new fully re-designed iPhone was going to be Apple's next big announcement." He also says he played with the prototype.