Lookout Life - Mobile Security 10.51.3-74326b

I myself exhibit a chronic indifference towards Security apps on the market. It might come from my total lack of of concern, and from my general selective nature when it comes to where I connect from, and what I'm installing. And that works quite fine with the free version of Lookout Mobile Security. But does Lookout work with me?

Lookout Mobile Security bases its effectiveness on the number of devices that use it. At least that's what I got from its introductory screens. Reports will likely cause alarms and put the Lookout team to work in order to prevent further infections from that particular source. The bottom line is, don't open that strange email attachment... leave it for someone else to do it first.

A particular perk here is that system analysis takes place in the cloud. That makes me imagine how your entire storage is copied into an unknown server and examined by little gray men with big beady eyes.

We also have the (by now) standard location feature. By creating an account (which you will have to do anyway) you will be able to access the lookout.com website and monitor your devices from anywhere. The problem I found here is that location services don't work that well. There is a lot of delay when soliciting a pinpoint. I also found the page to be unresponsive at times. If I wouldn't know how this feature works from other apps of the kind, I would be more forgiving.

In this case though, stability is a big problem with Lookout Mobile Security. Not only that the website seems to falter, but the app itself sometimes slows down to a crawl. Admittedly, this seldom happened, but I could not figure out what was causing it. I wasn't running eleven things in the background, I promise.

In any case, the Scream feature lets you remotely trigger an alarm that bypasses the device's audio settings. Quite nice. It's not a literal scream, but a wailing alarm sound. And you can switch it off whenever you want from both ends.

Data backup was the most handy feature I found in Lookout Mobile Security. Between photos, call logs and contacts, only the latter can be accessed in the free version. But that's fine since it's the most sensible data you'd really want recovered almost every time. I know Google stores your personal information, but it's nice to have a backup of your choosing for a change. The data can be retrieved from the lookout.com website either as vCard or CSV (the Excel type).

There are several other features that are only available if you'd upgrade to premium, but since I did not have a perfect experience with the free version, I can't recommend you go for the full features.

Features (free)

• Active Malware prevention
• Theft protection (location and alarm)
• Backup (contacts are backed up in cloud storage)

Final Thoughts

The free Lookout Mobile Security looks very much like a demo. It displays a lot of features that you can't access but can fantasize about. The full version contains much more features and goodies, but you should probably use the basic set-up for a while before deciding on an upgrade.