Updated 12-10-2010

Security on mobile devices is becoming more important as mobile devices become much more powerful. A virus or Trojan horse on your smart phone can be just as damaging as a malicious piece of software on your desktop. With that in mind I have always been very selective about the apps I download and install on my phone, they are all from known sources such as Google, Facebook and Rovio. However after hearing about Lookout Mobile Security suite from Leo Laporte on Twit.tv I decided to give it a try to see what it can offer.

The two features that I found most interesting were the Missing Device and Remote Wipe functions of the suite. Because I was already being very careful with what apps I installed I was skeptical about the benefits of the Anti-virus portion of the suite. Also the Backup feature seems a little redundant seeing as most of all my data is in the cloud. But the features related to helping me locate or secure my device should it be lost or stolen were compelling.

Anti-virus
This section of the review will be very short, because as far as I know there are no virus for Android phones in the Market Place right now. So all you see is the message saying the downloaded app is being scanned then a message saying that it passed the scan. This gives you some piece of mind, but it’s very hard to say if it is actually doing anything to protect your phone.

Backup
Backup is another feature that I personally am not concerned about. What exactly do you need to be backed up? Your contacts are automatically synced with your Google account, and nearly every app is cloud based. Only photos have the chance to be lost on my phone if it dies, and that can easily be fixed with regular syncing to my computer or use of an online service like Picassa Web or Flickr.

I can see other use cases where users might use their phone more as a primary device for storing all their e-mail, photos and maybe even PDF documents etc. But personally I think we are much better served by using cloud services on a phone than trying to store anything meaningful on it.

Missing Device
At the time of this post Remote Wipe was not supported on the Android version, which was the main feature I wanted in the first place. So I just played with the missing device locator. The locator feature has two parts the really lost phone locator, and the slightly lost phone locator.

The really lost phone locator is when you think your phone is not at your location at all. Maybe it was stolen or you left it somewhere. But this feature allows you to turn on GPS remotely and use a web client to show you the current location of your phone. If the phone is not turned on it will keep trying to locate it and if it is eventually turned on the service will notify you via e-mail with it’s location. This feature will hopefully never be needed but it you did need it it could be a life saver.

The slightly lost phone locator just lets you login to the website and make your phone start screeching at max volume for 2 mins until you find it. So useful if you know it’s in your general location but you just can’t find it.

The Problem
The big problem I have with this app is the resources it seems to take up. I have a now relatively old original Droid phone but it runs everything else just fine and is snappy doing it. But after installing Lookout Mobile Security I noticed significant performance issues. Mainly my phone would take several seconds to show the main screens when coming out of sleep. This is very annoying when you are trying to make a call or look something up.

The first thing I tried was disabling the the anti-virus and backup, but that had little effect. I then removed the app and my phone is running well again.

BEGIN UPDATE 12-10-2010
I have been noticing more and more performance issues with my Droid starting around the time I wrote this review. This morning I got the OTA update to 2.2.1 and all the performance problems went away. So I re-installed Lookout to give it another try and I have not noticed any performance hit this time around. It would seem that my phone may have been having some issues which the latest firmware update seems to have fixed.

Seeing as my main concern with this app was the performance, I now have to change my overall verdict to download it now. I still disable the virus scan because I do not download many apps and only from sources I know are reputable. But the backup and lost phone services are great.
END UPDATE 12-10-2010

Overall
The Missing Device features are good, but the performance hit of having the whole suite installed is too much to justify having this installed. If they split the suite up and offered just Remote Wipe and the other Missing Device features without the large performance hit this would be a must have app for me.

As the app stands right now it is off of my phone and I am back to just limiting my apps to well know apps. None of these ringtone, wallpaper or other garbage apps that hackers like to piggy back malicious code onto.