Norton 360 to support iPad, Android

Is it possible to jump on two bandwagons at once? Wouldn't you end with hopelessly divided legs at best, and fall with a shattered pelvis face-first onto the cobblestones at worst? If you're a security mega-corporation like Symantec, the answer to that would appear to be "no", at least based on the two hot tech bandwagons it's jumping on today with the launch of its fourth iteration of its everything-but-the-kitchen-sink security suite, Norton 360 v4. Possibly Symantec just has more legs than us mere mortals.

Yes, Norton 360v4 is an AV/Spyware/Backup suite with a bit more spit, polish and features than version 3 had, but you'd expect that. From that side, it's picking up the reputation-based file scanning used in Norton Internet Security already, as well as adding some startup management tools for memory hogging applications. Recent versions of Symantec's Norton products have largely lost the image of being memory hogging system killers. Largely, but your experience may vary.

So what's all this got to do with bandwagon jumping? Well, the features listed above may be nice to have, but that's not the main thrust of Norton's marketing release today, which instead talks up iPad, iPhone and Android applications.

Ah, you might think -- AV vendors once again jumping into the murky waters of smartphone AV software. Not quite, or at least not quite yet.

Instead, the Android app and iPhone/iPad apps will give you access to your Norton online storage accounts. The standard $129.99/12 month/3 user version of 360 comes with 2GB online, while the $149.99 /12 month/3 user version premium version gives you 25GB of online storage.

Or, in other words, Norton's bolted on dropbox/mobileme/sugarsync (delete according to your own smartphone preferences) style capability to Norton 360 v4. While that's obviously not a terrible feature to have per se, it's not quite the same thing as supporting the smartphones themselves, especially when some of the options on offer have completely free clients with the same amount of storage space.

The Android app is available in Beta now, and is rather oddly named Norton Tiki, which suggests a burning torch to us.  The iPhone/iPad apps are, according to the release "planned to be available free of charge on the iPhone App Store and Android Market in the next few weeks.". Quite why an iPhone App would be made available in the Android marketplace isn't entirely clear to us, and presumably the whole thing depends on Apple's often elusive tick of approval in any case.