These types of services are neccessary in this day of smartphones and I use a similar service on my iPad and my Blackberry. My husband just got an Android Smartphone and we haven't addressed security concerns on his phone yet.
Below are some ideas that can help make your personal data more secure should your device fall into nefarious hands. Hope you find it helpful.
Sprint is offering a service called 'Total Equipment Protection App' for customers using their "Total Equipment Protection' plan. However at $7 a month, I'm too cheap to pay that. That's $84 a year that is pretty much wasted on us. We don't have a tendency to lose or break phones and the 2 times in the past 10 years we've needed a replacement phone, I purchased off of Ebay.
BLACKBERRY - If you lose your BB, you do want to notify your carrier to deactivate your device so the "borrower" cannot use it. However, first of all you should look at applications that are avail in the BB App World. Smart Lock & Wipe at a bargain price of $0.99 will allow you to remotely lock/wipe your device so no one has access to your personal info. There is another app called Emergency Lock & Wipe that cost $4.99 however the details given do not indicate if this can be done remotely.
You can also set a password on your BB that will automatically wipe all data after 10 incorrect entries. To access this feature, go to Options-Security Options - General Settings.
APPLE - offers their MobileMe application at a subscription rate of $99 per year, which seems a bit steep to me. If you currently have an iPod, iPhone or iPad, you can access the site for free and login to locate your device and send a message to the screen along with a 2 minute alarm that overides silent mode. If unable to locate your device, you can use their site to remotely lock and wipe your device back to factory settings so your personal info is removed. To use, goto http://www.me.com/. If it says it cannot locate your device, leave the page open for a few minutes, it took about 5-10 minutes to find my iPad on the map.
You can also set a PIN number for your device in the Settings that will automatically wipe the device if an incorrect password is entered 10 times. I usually keep this turned off, but do turn it on when my iPad goes out in the world with me.
