Originally Posted by
IAmBBJosh You can recover data, but the data was encrypted.
You can set the iPhone to do a full wipe after you enter the wrong password 10 times as well, but the remote wipe will also go through any other SIM card or WiFi network the phone uses, and if you've nicked a phone you're probably not smart enough to recover data or hack past the passcode screen anyway, so you'll take the original SIM out and put another one in or hook up to a WiFi network at some point, and when that happens, the remote wipe will initiate.
BTW, with GMail IMAP on the iPhone, SSL is used throughout the entire communication process, with no middleman server between GMail and the phone. This is a more secure setup than the BIS, though probably inferior to the BES, depending on the setup of the BES server in question.
At the end of the day, nothing is 100% secure. BlackBerry devices are quite close, but there's always a way in to anything, as demonstrated by the Torch browser hack. iPhones do not have security as a priority, but they still have fairly good measures in place which are, at the very least, enough to keep a thief out of your data. Android phones are pretty much the least secure phones on the market.
If I had top secret confidential information I didn't want to get into anyone else's hands as a matter of urgency, I'd likely keep it in a BES connected BlackBerry. The devices are the most secure, as is the BES setup. But the BIS offers lackluster security in comparison in terms of encryption as the data passes through. For this reason, I wouldn't trust that protocol as much.
The protocol of simple direct IMAP (mail server > client as opposed to mail server > BIS > client) with SSL enabled is more trustworthy than the BIS IMO.
So, really, it depends where you stand. The devices are the most secure but the BIS protocol has flaws. And I'm just rambling now, so I'll shut up :p