I've been playing with the Bolt browser for a couple of hours now and my impressions are generally pretty good. Bolt is from Cambridge, Massachusetts based Bitstream, a company best known for it's digital fonts and font rendering software. But Bitstream is not new to the browser field, they also produce the ThunderHawk browser for Windows Mobile and Symbian. Bolt, like ThanderHawk (and Opera Mini, Skyfire, UCWEB and Teashark), is a server based browser meaning that much of the page rendering is done in the cloud and the browser is a relatively "thin" client application. ThunderHawk is a $50/year subscription product but Bolt is free.
Bolt is written in Java ME like Opera Mini and according to Bitstream can run on "nearly all" Java based handsets that support MIDP 2 and CLDC 1.0. The only handsets Bitstream specifically says Bolt will not run on are ones using the Palm OS. Blackberries and "selected" Windows Mobile handsets are specifically mentioned as supported.
Bolt was announced yesterday on several tech sites including BlackberryCool, CrackBerry, IntoMobile, BerryReview and MobileCrunch Each site published a Beta code which was supposted to be limited to a few thousand users. I entered one of the codes on the Bolt download page yesterday and waited for my promised SMS containing the download link, which never arrived. As usually happens with these sorts of things, the process and servers completely broke down under the load. BitStream's John Sidine left a comment on BerryReview explaining;
"We completely underestimated the response we’d get to the beta. Initially we had a manual process in place to distribute download links. But we were quickly overwhelmed by requests for BOLT so we switched to an automated process at about 9:00 AM Eastern today. Sometime after noon Eastern today, the server handling the downloads “blew up.” We are now in the process of switching over to a dedicated server we’re confident can handle the demand. We appreciate everyone’s patience. We expect the new server to be online by 4:00 PM Eastern today. "
John was true to his word and shortly after 4:00 EST, I was able to get in and request Bolt for my two phones a Nokia N95-3 and an old iDEN BlackBerry 7100i. I'm happy to report that Bolt runs on both phones and is a formidable new competitor in the world of third party mobile browsers. I'm not sure if any of the codes are still good but even if the beta is full Bolt says people entering a code will get priority in the queue for the next round of invites.
Rendering Accuracy
Probably the best feature of Bolt is the way it maintains the original appearance of pages. A recurring problem with most full web mobile browsers is overlapping of page elements. Bolt seems to do much better than Opera Mini at preventing overlapping. You can really see the difference in the two images above of this site's navigation menu. Another difference is in the way the two browsers handle left floated images as shown in the screenshots below with the Nokia 7510 product photos. Opera Mini formats the text as a single column until it gets to the image where the column of text shifts to the right forcing the user to scroll right to continue reading, Bolt reduces the size of the image and narrows the text column so that you can continue reading without horizontal scrolling. Very nice!
There are however areas where Bolt's rendering is less stellar. All text is rendered in the same font weight and style. Bold and italic appear as normal text. Header elements like the H1 post titles on this site are the same weight as body text. CSS font-size is also ignored. Opera Mini, on the other hand, handles all of these stylistic rendering elements correctly except italic which it displays as bold.
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posted by Dennis Bournique
January 17, 2009 @ 1:09 am
7 View Comments
