TechnologyCrowd

A few months ago I tried out a beta version of the Bolt mobile browser.  At the time, I had just gotten used to the SurePress technology and using the BlackBerry browser, so after a few glitches with the install and trouble navigating I decided to remove it and use the standard browser.

Today I received an e-mail from Bitstream indicating that they have made significant upgrades under the hood and removing the Beta tag with the new version 1.5.  They also indicated that the latest version is 15% faster than the Beta3, so I decided to check it out.

I was able to install the software without any issues by going to Boltbrowser.com using my Storm.   The first thing you will notice is a nicely designed Favorites page with tabs for History and Feeds.  The Favorites are prefilled with several popular pages, but you can obviously add your own and there is a great deal of flexibility for categorizing and creating folders similar to a PC browser like Firefox.

In my opinion, the best feature about the Bolt browser is that it opens up the standard versions of web pages, instead of a mobile version.  I noticed this right away when testing out the ESPN homepage, it opened with the normal page with pictures and headlines all included.  I was not able to view video on ESPN, since they use flash, but the browser will play videos from many other sites including youtube, dailymotion, etc.

If you are on a page that has RSS feeds you can select the available feeds by hitting the menu button and selecting RSS List to see the available feeds for the site.  Selecting a feed brings you to a page with all of the recent feeds.  If you would like to subscribe, click on subscribe on the top left and it will fill in all of the information to add it to your feeds page.  Hit the menu button again and select save and the feed will be added to your feeds page.

One thing that takes a little getting used to is the movement and selecting since it does not use the SurePress functionality on the Storm.  An early frustration was having to constantly hit the menu button and scroll down to “show keyboard” any time I wanted to type something.  After spending a little time on the FAQ page, I found it to be helpful to go to the Preferences and disable the checkbox for “Inline Editing.”  This results in a box opening up with the keyboard when you select a box that requires typing, you type in what you want and can hit the menu button twice to say OK and input it.  I am still getting used to the navigation, but I think it is worth taking the time for the additional features.

I am not ready to completely stop using the standard browser, but I think this will be an excellent addition to my applications that I will use frequently when wanting to see full web pages instead of just mobile text pages.

Here is a list of the features as indicated on the BoltBrowser website:

• Server upgrades (make v1.5 more than 15% faster than Beta3)
• Cache support that enables directly browsing back to a previously visited page
• Download manager that downloads files directly within BOLT on JSR 75 capable devices
• Dedicated search bar, enabling search on popular search engines directly from BOLT
• Enhanced column width control that auto-aligns the text to columns for ease of reading
• Enhanced video support that includes inline media playing capability even on low-end devices
• Enhanced copy-paste support for BlackBerry devices
• Support for streaming videos of any length
• Volume UP/DOWN controls in the inline media player
• Ability to rearrange the subscribed feeds using the ‘grab’ feature
• Access to History links from the URL window with inline editing OFF
• One click access on Home Page that ensures the cursor jumps to the desired widget

As I become more familiar with the browser I may do a more in depth review, but my first impression was very positive so I wanted to share it now.

Go to the BoltBrowser website from a PC if you want to get more information or from you BlackBerry to download and install.