I've been using the new release of Bolt (V 1.04, aka Beta 3) for about a day now and I'm quite impressed. This release represents a significant upgrade. The new support for bold and italic fonts, file uploading and copying text from web pages is particularly welcome.
Bolt and italic support may seem like a small thing but it makes for a big improvement in the appearance and readability of many sites. Of all the server assisted Java based browsers Bolt is the only one to properly render bold, italic and bold-italic.
The new feature to upload photos and videos to web based services like YouTube and Flickr comes in the form of support for the html input tag's "file" type so it works with any site that has a web form for uploading. You can browse the phone's file system from within Bolt to select and directly upload content. This does require that your phone support the Java JSR 75 file system capability, which most modern phones do although operators, especially in the U.S., often block it on subsidized phones.
The new copy and paste function works well. To use it, first position the cursor near the beginning or end of the text you wish to copy. Then choose "Select Text" from the menu and move the cursor horizontally and/or vertically to highlight what you want to copy and then choose "Copy" from the menu. I found it was a little tricky to select text as Bolt seemed to want to "jump" the cursor to the next column or paragraph. But with a little patience it's doable. Bolt has implemented its own internal clipboard to store copied text rather than using the phone OS clipboard. This is a good choice as most feature phones don't natively implement copy and paste and thus don't have a system clipboard. With Bolt you can copy text from a webpage and then paste it into an webmail message or a web based "Notes" application like or Evernote on any phone. However the lack of direct access to the system clipboard means that on phones that do support copy/paste like BlackBerries, Symbian phones and most Sony Ericssons, there is no obvious way to copy text into an SMS or the phone's native email or notes applications. I did find a workaround that let me transfer the contents of the Bolt clipboard to the system clipboard on both the Nokia N95 and BlackBerry 7100i. What I had to do is:
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posted by Dennis Bournique
June 30, 2009 @ 3:27 pm
7 View Comments
