avast! 4 PDA Edition (WinCE/Palm)

avast! PDA Edition is designed to protect pocket devices (PDAs) from viruses. The importance of PDAs is growing every day and it is quite likely that these devices will soon become a target for new virus attacks. With such devices having better and better connectivity, such an attack is getting easier to realize.

Scanning kernel

We have developed a special "pocket version" of the scanning kernel, with the following features:

• Small size and memory requirements
• High speed, and so a quick response, even on slower CPUs

A typical scan of the whole pocket device (with 16-128MB of memory) only takes a few seconds, therefore it's possible to run it on a regular basis.

Specific detection capabilities: avast! PDA Edition detects only viruses (or any other malicious code) written for the target environment (code capable of running on the given OS). This guarantees a small size of the antivirus deployment. Even though it would be possible to detect all known viruses, even on a PDA, this would tend to make a large deployment footprint on a small device, when the purpose of the antivirus product is to protect the pocket device primarily; in other words, memory requirements, size and speed are more important here than the detection of viruses for other platforms.

Reports & logs

avast! PDA Edition can create report files with a detailed description of the scanning process: what was scanned, what was the result, etc. This can be important for later reference, or just to make sure that all the requested files were scanned. avast! PDA Edition features an integrated log viewer (note: not included in the SmartPhone edition, to minimize the product size).

Updates

An important part of any antivirus system is the capability to quickly react to new infections (updates of the virus database). avast! PDA Edition features a special updater able to download and install new updates. To download the updates, avast! PDA Edition is able to use all standard means of data transfer for mobile devices (GPRS, for example), thus, it is fully integrated into the "pocket environment". The size of transferred data is usually just a couple of hundreds of bytes, so the (often quite slow) communication lines are not stressed in any way. Updating via ActiveSync is also supported.

Product sizes

avast! PDA Edition is optimized for size and speed. As a result, avast! PDA Edition for Palm OS is approximately 30KB; avast! PDA Edition for Windows CE is about 200KB. The virus database currently does not exceed 1kB.

Installation

Installation is performed from a PC, using standard tools for computer-PDA synchronization (ActiveSync, in most cases).