The Story

Symantec is a serious player in the anti-virus market and its Norton-branded products will be well know to PC users. Now the Norton brand has gone mobile with the free Norton Mobile Security Beta app, crammed with text and call-blocking and anti-theft skills alongside its malware-slaying skills.

The Experience

Symantec has been busy talking up its anti-virus skills in the mobile market with various security stories including the discovery of a fake Android update with malicious tendencies. Hence the arrival of Norton Mobile Security, currently in Beta form but available for download to any Android device.

Norton’s three-pronged anti-malware, anti-theft and anti-call and text spam approach certainly looks impressive. Of the anti-virus apps we’ve seen, none offer that juicy triumvirate of functions, not even the superb Lookout.

Norton starts up with a limited license that expires in a week and must then be activated. We immediately assumed that this was yet another ‘free’ app that actually requires payment of some form after a limited trial period. We were wrong. Hit the activation button and you get a code for a free 90-day license. What this does suggest, however, is that once out of Beta, this will no longer be a free download.

First up, the anti-malware offers the option of scanning just the device, or also scanning the SD card, handy if you’ve just downloaded a few new items to your phone and want to scan them in a single sweep rather than spending an age also scanning your SD card. That said, any anomalies should be picked up by the real-time scanner that monitors incoming downloads.

Talking of which, Norton actually missed the test virus we uploaded to our device but then so did Lookout. In fact only Dr Web managed to pick it up so we’re not going to panic just yet.

What did panic us a little, however, is the remote unlock feature. It works like this – you nominate up to five buddies whose phone numbers can be used to unlock your phone and should it become locked, your friends text a predetermined message to your phone. Rather than chance our arm on locking our test device permanently, we ‘forgot’ our password for altering settings and used one of our ‘buddies’ phones to text the unlock message. It didn’t work. Scan the Android Market reviews and there are a number of tales of locked phones that can’t be revived due to this feature not working and Norton being unresponsive to help emails.

And it’s for this reason we have to mark Norton down. Blocked text and calls works just fine and the anti-malware scanner, despite missing our test virus, appears to function as it should. We’ll get a new test virus coded for our next test by the way.

Remote device locking and unlocking is an incredibly useful feature, particularly as we’re all storing so much more sensitive information on our phones these days but it’s more of a hindrance than a help when you can’t unlock the thing again.

We should point out that this is a public Beta and we’ll be sure to re-rate Norton when it’s officially out of testing, but we also have a duty to warn of pitfalls of apps available on Android Market, so that’s exactly what we’re doing.

The Bottom Line

Perfectly functional anti-virus and call/text blocker but the remote locking and unlocking feature is buggy and we wouldn’t trust it on our ‘droid. Yet.

Additional Info

Version reviewed 1.5.0.154
Requires Android 1.6 or higher