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Review by Raistlin
I’ve used Kaspersky for my PCs previously and have been very satisfied. They historically have been ranked pretty high for great intervention and also for efficient use of space and RAM. Androids are getting to the point where they are the PC of the Smartphone industry: open source, ubiquitous, and vulnerable. So we need to have a strong security suite on our phones and tablets. But which one is still up in the air. The good news with most (including this one)? You can try it first.
If you download the Kaspersky app from the Amazon App Store or Play or direct link (usa.kaspersky .com/dl/mobile) you’ll get a fully functional preview with a firewall. You can also select to try the full suite (this product) for 30 days for free. And you should.
It includes all the functionality that you may be used to with well known products (like one of my favorites Lookout Mobile Security) but also includes some stuff that those products usually dont.
Included:
Antivirus, antispam, antispywaren+webpage blocking, phishing link alerts, (and really cool) antiphishing in texts (this is something we don’t think of much but is a huge driver for exploit. We get a link in a text and don’t worry too much about clicking it. That’s an error. This app is supposed to stop that link.)
High performance, low impact to data/ram/battery (I can tell you I had it running for an hour on a Galaxy S3 and checked battery usage and it wasn’t even on the page of top users. The page ended at 2% so this app didn’t even use 2% of the battery after an hour. That’s pretty good. You will have to download an update the first time and it make bounce usage up to about 40 MB.)
Anti-theft location, block, erase, mugshot (this is very similar to a host of other resources like Lookout, AVG, Norton, etc where you can remotely track your device using GPS, take pics of your thief through the front facing camera, and lock/ wipe your phone and CD card and even if your thief has changed SIMs which is a nice feature. Don’t get too caught up on the GPS location as it isn’t always acurate and you shouldn’t go knocking on doors of unsavory people anyway. Just tell your local police department. I’ve used this to find phones that were misplaced. Once I found a phone that was in my home by locating it near my home on the map - so I knew it wasn’t where I had just been. Another time I located it at a school so checked the field where we just were. Not exact but helps.)
Call and text filtering (this is nice and brings Android in to the same level of control as iOS and Windows Phone 8 so you can block on a per call/ text basis)
Privacy protection (I haven’t used this yet. I guess if you have an unlocked phone and don’t want people to see some stuff you can hide apps/ info if you hand the phone to them. I lock my phone so it’s not necessary.)
Overall, this is an impressive program. I really love how little it is using in the background (both data and battery). I am not sold on paying much for these programs since there are a lot of free services you could get to do a very similar job. But if you want a service you can set and forget this is a great starting point.