McAfee selling iOS protection you already have

McAfee today announced that the iOS edition of its WaveSecure mobile security software lets you remotely wipe or lock your iPhone or iPad from a Web portal, as well as back up contacts, photos, and videos to its servers for safekeeping in case a device is lost, stolen, or damaged.

Which is all well and good, except Apple has offered the remote wipe and lock features for more than a year at no charge to all iOS users via its free Find My iPhone/iPad service, and its iTunes software has backed up all that data (and more) since the very first iPhone shipped in 2007. The forthcoming iCloud will also do that backup online -- at no charge -- without iTunes.

So what is the point of McAfee's $20 offering to do the same thing Apple provides at no cost? One of McAfee's answers was amusing: It said iOS users could retrieve the backed-up information from Android or other devices that support WaveSecure. Yeah, sure -- iOS users will switch to Android or BlackBerry if their iPhone or iPad is lost, stolen, or damaged. Never mind that data is available through iTunes and soon iCloud.