RIM today announced BlackBerry Protect, a free service which will let consumer BlackBerry users track, wipe, and restore lost phones.

BlackBerry Protect is an app that runs in the background on recent BlackBerry (8000 and 9000-series) models. On the device itself, users can select an interval to periodically back up PIM information to RIM's secure servers.

From a Web portal, users can also grab the location of their BlackBerries on a map, make a misplaced phone ring loudly for a minute (even if it's in silent mode), lock it, make a message appear on its screen, or wipe it completely.

The location functionality will vary from model to model based on whether the phone uses satellite GPS or cell-tower GPS, RIM said.

BlackBerry Protect follows Apple's Find my iPhone and Microsoft's My Phone, a similar service for Windows Mobile phones. There are also third-party apps and services which help you find a lost phone.

Many of BlackBerry Protect's features have been available for RIM's business server customers for years. To some extent, the new offering shows the delicate balance RIM has to maintain their sales of corporate servers through offering exclusive features, yet also to compete in the market of individual consumers who buy single phones.

"What we're really taking about here is taking the pieces of functionality that exist already and making them available in a very coherent package for consumer customers," said Michael Brown, RIM's director of security product management.

But that delicate balance has also held back some RIM features. For instance, consumer BlackBerrys have inferior Microsoft Exchange syncing features to other smartphones, in part because connecting to Exchange is one of the major features of RIM's business server suite.

Protect will be available on a private, invitation-only beta basis next week. RIM didn't announce a time frame for when Protect will become more widely available, other than to say that it will be later this year. Typically, BlackBerry system updates such as this are dependent on carrier approval, which means they roll out to different carriers over a period of several months.