Sony Ericsson :: BOLT Mobile Browser 2.0 Beta Released

bitstream unveils the second generation of the acclaimed bolt mobile browser, the most fully featured mobile browser, now featuring tabbed browsing.
press release:
marlborough, massachusetts – march 23, 2010 – 700 million pages viewed, 190 million minutes of video watched, 180 terabytes of data transferred, and over 5 million users since bolt was first introduced in february 2009, bitstream inc. (nasdaq: bits) today announced beta availability of bolt 2.0, the next generation of the bolt mobile browser, the most fully featured browser for mobile phones of all types. among the new features in the bolt 2.0 beta version is tighter integration with facebook – by far the most popular domain visited by bolt users around the world – including the ability to use facebook’s instant messaging service and to seamlessly copy text or links and post them to a facebook account directly from within the bolt browser. the most important new feature of bolt 2.0 is the addition of tabbed browsing, letting people simultaneously browse multiple websites and easily switch between them.

each new version of bolt becomes more exciting to announce, said anna magliocco-chagnon, president and ceo of bitstream. we are closely listening to our end-users through our user forum, our twitter and facebook pages, and their comments on blog posts and articles, and they are guiding our development roadmap in important ways. it is this close relationship we are building with our users to which we attribute our stunning growth. bolt added 1 million new users in the last five weeks alone. like its predecessor, bolt 2.0 is engineered to run on mobile phones of all types, from low-end feature phones to high-end smartphones. bolt is the only major webkit-based cloud computing browser and is built to deliver a pc-like browsing experience on mobile phones. the second generation of bolt maintains all the features of the first generation bolt browser, including many that no other mobile browser offers:

perfect rendering of web pages on any class of phone, scoring 100 percent on the web standard’s project acid3 test. streaming video from many of the world’s most popular video sharing websites, including Internet, myspace, blip.tv and metacafe, as well as websites that stream videos such as cnn, espn and any website with embedded Internet videos. super fast download speeds. copy and pasting text. built-in integration with twitter and facebook. password manager. download/upload manager. ability to run web-based applications written in ajax, javascript and other web programming languages, ranging from google docs to mafia wars. the inclusion of widgets, standalone mobile applications that are run directly from the browser, such as a weather app, calendar app, calculator, twitter client and others. these widgets let people using any phone take part in the mobile apps revolution.

best of breed over-the-air data compression, resulting in faster load times and decreased data usage. patented split screen viewing to make surfing complicated web pages simple, and viewing content on the smallest of screens easy. additional notable upgrades in bolt 2.0 include a faster widget gallery with updated user interface and a server upgrade to webkit 4.03. bitstream has made bolt extremely easy to use, with keyboard shortcuts to quickly navigate pages and scale up and down through the browser’s six levels of magnification. comprehensive instructions on how to use all of bolt’s many features can be found at http://boltbrowser.com/faq.html. bolt is free to download and works on any mobile java (j2me) phone (approximately 75 percent of the estimated 4 billion phones in use today). handset manufacturers and wireless operators looking to preload bolt on their mobile phones can license a custom version of bolt built for any operating system or platform.

recognizing that some mobile phones currently in use cannot support the full size applications and some network providers limit the size of application downloads, bitstream also offers a light version of the bolt mobile browser, bolt litetm. bolt lite contains all the essential features of the bolt mobile browser, retaining bolt’s feature-rich functionality, best-of-breed download speeds and desktop pc-style page layout in a smaller package optimized for entry-level devices. the bolt 2.0 beta can be downloaded for free at:
http://boltbrowser.com/beta/download.html. people can still download bolt 1.7 and bolt lite for free at http://boltbrowser.com.n)