As previously mentioned<\/a>, I am the “proud” owner of a Nokia N73 phone (which unfortunately suffers from a few “build quality issues”). As this is a phone with more functionality than a PC I bought ten years ago (512MB disk space for example), and it runs on the Symbian OS I am curious about its susceptibility to virus attacks.<\/p>\n

<\/a> The Nokia N73 is used for mobile email (thanks to 3<\/a>) and came with a free trial of F-Secure AntiVirus<\/a>. This has now run out. The free trial was excellent, however given that it was for about six weeks duration and during that time, my phone was not set up for mobile mail it seems to have been a bit wasted.<\/p>\n

Turning to the wonders of the Internet for inspiration, I thought it would be fairly easy to find a free Anti Virus package for the phone. A trip to AVG (Grisoft<\/a>) was no use, as while they do many versions for Linux, BSD, Windows etc, there was nothing which would run on the phone.<\/p>\n

So, off to the search engines. A quick run on Google found a post on Mobiledia.com<\/a> which claimed Symantec had released a free AV package for Symbian phones. Looks good to me, so off to the URL in the article<\/a>, I go. Sadly this simply redirected to the Vista PublicBETA<\/a> page which needs Vista and a PC to work. Not much use for my Nokia N73. Searching the Symbian site finds an AV for Symbian but it is $44.95 rather than free – and a quick look at the Mobiledia.com site shows the post was made in March 05. Ah. Back to Google.<\/p>\n

<\/a> Continued searches on a variety of engines seems to only throw up conflicting data. Some sites assert the S60 V3 operating system on the N73 doesn’t need AV yet (strikes me as madness, Nokias are popular phones and as such major targets for virus writers) and most of the others are posts by people looking for N73 AV software. I have found a few sites which offer it although none for free (lots free for V2 of the OS though). Just as despair was about to set in, I found the BullGuard Mobile Antivirus site<\/a>. Could this be the answer? A download later, and I am pushing the .SIS file through the Nokia Application Installer. After a few seconds, the installer pops up “Please finish the install on the phone user interface” so I look at the phone.<\/p>\n

Sadly the phone says “Installation of BullGuard_S60.sis not supported” and quits out.<\/p>\n

Back to the drawing board. If you know of any free AV packages for N73 phones PLEASE let me know. Also if you know of any plugins which allow the N73 \/ Lifeblog software to talk to WordPress I will be your friend for life.<\/p>\n