Updated 11 Feb, 2012, 4:06 pm IST

MWC 2010: New BOLT Version Announced

16 Feb, 2010, 2:40 pm IST | tech2 News Staff |

Exactly a year after its public debut, Bitstream has announced a new version of the BOLT Mobile Browser, 1.7.

This new version offers new features including direct Twitter integration, Spanish and Russian language support, an enhanced download manager, increased streaming video features and the ability to run widgets.

BOLT has surpassed 4 million users, streamed over 135 million minutes of video, served more than 512 million pages and downloaded more than 132 terabytes of data.

With BOLT being used by people in more than 100 countries, Bitstream has added language support so more users can use BOLT with a user interface in their own language. The 1.7 version of BOLT now includes options for English, Spanish and Russian languages.

Although BOLT already runs web-based applications written in Ajax, Javascript and other Web programming languages, such as the popular Facebook game Mafia Wars and Google Docs, BOLT 1.7 is adding widget functionality. Now in beta, BOLT widgets allow users to install small self-contained Web applications that run directly from within BOLT. Because these widgets are installed directly within BOLT they load and execute faster than website-based applications, giving users a wider variety of utility for their mobile phones. BOLT users can discover, select and install specific Web apps through a BOLT Widget Gallery. BOLT’s widgets are written as standard W3C widgets, a standard with broad industry support.

BOLT 1.7 now features keypad shortcuts that make zooming in and out of Web content easy. Users can now scale text and images without having to change the zoom presets in their preferences.

BOLT supports streaming video from multiple video sharing websites such as YouTube, Yahoo, Google, RuTube, MySpace and more. Users can watch videos posted in CNN and ESPN, as well as watch embedded YouTube videos on any website.

For users on networks that support socket connections, BOLT v1.7 offers automatic socket support resulting in a 15 percent speed increase for most users. Previous versions of BOLT offered socket support that had to be manually configured by the user.

BOLT 1.7 features an upgraded download manager that supports multiple simultaneous downloads as well as the ability to pause and restart an active download.

Other capabilities include:

Best of breed page load speeds
Most accurate page rendering
Best of breed data compression
Displays full websites just as they would appear on desktop computers
Streams videos from popular video services such as YouTube
Copy and paste text
Uploads video and photo files directly to websites from browser
Only major WebKit based cloud computing browser
FOTA updates
Six levels of magnification

Bitstream is also offering a light version of the BOLT mobile browser, BOLT Lite, that contains all the essential features of the BOLT mobile browser in a smaller package optimized for entry-level devices.

BOLT and BOLT Lite are both available for free download here.

Tags: MWC 2010