It’s a known fact that we don’t believe anti-virus is necessary on Symbian-powered smartphones. We’re not shy about this, and frequently take the opportunity to add some reality to the often-exaggerated reports from the various mobile security companies. Thus, you can imagine my surprise when, a few weeks ago, I received an email from the folks at F-Secure, offering a copy of their F-Secure Mobile Security Suite for review here on Symbian-Guru.com.
After pinging our Twitter followers, I decided to take them up on the offer. Two of the things that I often cite when berating the company is that there’s no need to have an application on your phone that sucks up precious battery life and RAM, while protecting against ‘threats’ that, in 4 years of Symbian usage, I have yet to experience personally, or meet anyone who has personally been affected. Thus, the review would give me a chance to accurately test how well the F-Secure Mobile Security Suite manages your phone’s resources.
Resources
The installation process, as expected, goes very smoothly. For the record, I installed v5.10.5204, directly from F-Secure, with a file size of 698kb, which is quite small, once installed. RAM usage, according to Handy Taskman, is ~1.4MB, which is quite negligible, in my opinion. You can see the difference in the screenshots below:
The most important aspect, however, is the battery usage. To measure this, I installed the Nokia Energy Profiler, which measures energy usage on your Symbian-powered smartphone. You can see the result in the screenshot below. The first few seconds, you can see, is with only Energy Profiler and Screenshot running. The first bump is when I pressed the menu button, and then the next increase in power consumption is from F-Secure starting up and activating its protection. However, as you can see, once F-Secure is started and then put in the background, the power consumption drops to nearly the same level it was at before I opened F-Secure. The next bump in the graph shows when I activated F-Secure again, and scrolled through the menus a bit.
From this, it appears as though my previous claims that F-Secure Mobile Security Suite would unnecessarily waste precious resources such as battery life and RAM are unfounded. With my normal usage of the Nokia E63, I was not able to notice any difference in the battery life with the application running or without. It appears as though F-Secure’s Mobile Security Suite is indeed a well-written application that uses minimal resources, both when active and when running quietly in the background.
Interface
Once you have installed F-Secure Mobile Security Suite, the application automatically runs when you boot your phone. This is the main screen, which shows vital information such as the current protection status and information on your subscription. The icons along the bottom are a rotating carousel, and consist of Virus Protection, Firewall, Anti-Theft, Settings, Buy, Learn More, and Statistics.
Virus Protection
In the Virus Protection area, you can see the time and date of your last full phone scan, and you can also initiate a full system scan. Scanning my Nokia E63, including the 8GB microSD card, took 4 minutes, which is quite fast. In the settings for this area, you can choose whether your phone should always be connected, and whether the application should automatically check for updates. There is a warning message when checking for updates, that doing so will use a single SMS message sent to a Finnish number. The warning is obvious and clearly explains the charge, and I was able to refuse the option and still use the application normally.
Firewall
The Firewall settings allow you to choose from various preset configurations, including allow all connections and deny all connections. You can also create custom rules for various types of connections, which is nice for a power user.
Anti-Theft
In the Anti-Theft settings, you can secure your phone against prying eyes, as well as setup a custom remote reset option. You can specify a lock code, and then remotely lock your phone via SMS, as well as choose to have your phone locked if the SIM card is changed. You can also specify an SMS number that will receive an alert, and you can setup a remote wipe feature. Note that on certain phones such as the recent Eseries, you can setup remote lock and lock on SIM change in the phone’s built-in settings. However, F-Secure’s remote wipe feature could be handy.
Settings
You can access each feature’s settings directly, or manage all of the settings in this one single area.
Buy
The buy link allows you to purchase or renew your subscription directly from your device. You can choose to charge a credit card directly, apply the cost to your cell phone bill, or simply enter in a custom activation code, if you purchased one from F-Secure’s website.
Learn More
This area simply contains a number of links to various areas of the F-Secure website, such as their online store, information about protection, and news from the F-Secure labs.
Statistics
This is a quick recap of your current and recently-past protection, showing the number of malware threats that you’re protected against, as well as a count of the number of scanned files on your phone. You can also see the number of connections allowed and blocked by the Firewall. You can reset these if you wish, as well.
In the Options submenu on the main screen, there are a few additional options. One that I liked, in particular, is the ‘Send to Friend’, which allows you to SMS your friend a free trial of F-Secure for their phone.
Conclusion
The F-Secure Mobile Security Suite is a small application that uses less than 1MB of internal storage, less than 1MB of RAM, and minimal power resources. Setup is incredibly smooth, and the application runs well on my phone. There are plenty of options to customize, and you can manually initiate a full scan of your phone, which checks out every single file to ensure that there are no malware or viruses on your phone. The Anti-Theft settings are nice, and could be convenient if you’ve had your phone stolen.
However, I was unable to properly test the Anti-Virus part because, well, I don’t have any mobile viruses to test with. In my 5 years of using Symbian-powered devices, I have never personally had a device infected, nor have I spoken with anyone who personally had a phone infected. So while the application is nice, and well done, it still appears to be protecting me against threats that do not seem to exist, at least in my experience.
Given that an annual license for F-Secure’s Mobile Security Suite costs $40/year, and is only licensed for a single IMEI, I just can’t recommend that anyone purchase it. Also, given that it’s so simple to hard-reset a Symbian device, which would erase any installed applications, including any malware, it still seems to me that F-Secure Mobile Security Suite is an expensive solution to a non-existent problem.
Update: I’ve received clarification from F-Secure for those of you with multiple phones, or who change phones often:
Q: I have 3 Symbian devices that I switch freely between (5800 XpressMusic, N79, and E63). Would I be able to use the same code on all three, and have it simply recognize that I’m using the same SIM card in each phone (this is how Ovi Maps is able to easily transfer licenses between devices), or would I need to purchase a license for each phone?
A: The license is tied to the device itself. Therefore, in this scenario you would need to have one separate license per device.
Q: Also, if I purchased a license for the N79, and then sold it on Ebay or Craigslist, and purchased an N86 8MP, would I need to purchase a new license for my new phone, or would F-Secure be able to transfer that license to my new phone for me?
A: You can transfer the license to the new device. You would of course have to download the correct client for the new device, but transferring the license over is a very simple process.
What do you think? Have you personally had a phone be infected with malware or a virus?
