Panda Security has announced the availability of the first public beta for their do-everything home user suite, Panda Global Protection 2014.

The package includes an antivirus engine, firewall, identity protection, spam filter, parental controls, virtual keyboard, local and online backup modules, file encryption and shredding, and remote PC access.

New features this time include boot analysis of your system for better detection of even the stealthiest of malware.

There will also now be protection for Mac, iOS and Android devices (the latter component isn’t available yet, but clicking “Multi-device protection” within the program will tell you more).

And this is all packaged in a very Windows 8-like interface, with colourful tiles giving an appealing front end to the suite.

Another security tool adopts the Windows 8 look

What’s the program like? We found it installed easily, without requiring other security packages to be removed first. (You may still want to do so to reduce the chance of conflicts, but it’s not necessary).

The interface looks good and is generally easy to use. The Windows 8 style of interface isn’t applied consistently just yet, and occasionally you’re left to explore some fairly complex dialogs, but for the most part it works very well.

Performance, however, did prove to be an issue for us. Scans took an age, and other programs were considerably slower once Panda Global Protection 2014 was installed. This is of course exactly the kind of thing you expect from a beta, though, so we wouldn’t draw any conclusions from it just yet.

On balance, the suite has an extensive list of features, looks good and is (for the most part) easy to use. If you’re also affected by the performance problems then you won’t want to run it for long, but otherwise Panda Global Protection 2014 looks promising, and we’ll be interested to see how it progresses.