I've been using Bolt's new 1.5 release for a few days now and here are my impressions.
In general Bolt works very well on main phone, a Nokia N95-3. In fact, this is the first version of Bolt that I consider good enough to use as my main browser.
Here are my likes and dislikes.
Likes:
Excellent page rendering. Most sites look great in Bolt, fonts are particularly attractive, clean looking and readable. Unlike Opera Mini (image below, left), italic style appears as italic (image, below right. Image quality is about as good as it gets too.
Text columns that "snap" to screen margins. Granted, this is an essential feature in "keyhole" browsers but was missing in Bolt until now. It works, although when scrolling sideways by the column with the 4 and 6 keys it tends to overshoot a bit with the last few letters of longer sentences off screen. A couple of quick taps of the left or right directional pad keys is then needed to bring the column into perfect alignment with the viewport.
A working page cache. Again this is something we take for granted in browsers but was missing in Bolt up to now. Hitting the "Back" button now retrieves the previous page from the cache rather than reloading it from the network. This is a time and bandwidth saver and also gives more predicable results with sites where the content changes with every refresh. Interestingly reload from cache only seems to work when using "Back" button and or 9 ("Forward") key, not when picking the most recent page from the history list which causes the page to be re-downloaded.
Copy and Paste from Web pages. This works very much like it does in the latest Opera Mini 5 Beta. On any page you can chose "Page Tools > Select text" from the menu and then drag the mouse pointer to highlight some text (image, below left). Pressing the left soft key copies it into Bolt's paste buffer. You can then paste the copied text into the URL bar, search box or a web form on any page. If your phone has native copy/paste support you can get the copied text into the system clipboard by pasting it into the URL bar and then choosing "Edit" to open the "URL" in the system editor.
Faster page loads. Bolt feels faster than previous releases. I'm going to perform some formal spped test to confirm this but my gut feeling is that it's about 30-50% faster.
Cross platform support. OK this is not so much a "Like" but something that is improving. Bolt has always run well on the N95-3 which has loads of RAM, a releatively fast processor and one of best mobile JVMs in the business. But on lesser handsets my experiences with previous Bolt releases have been less than stellar with hangs, crashes and a sluggish UI.
I tried Bolt 1.5 in a couple of decidedly limited phones, a current, but bare-bones prepaid feature phone, the Motorola i776, and a three and a half year old BlackBerry 7100i, both running on the Boost Mobile prepaid network. Bolt 1.5 installed and ran on both phones, something that wasn't true of some of the
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posted by Dennis Bournique
October 9, 2009 @ 1:10 pm
7 View Comments
