Bitstream's new Bolt mobile browser: built for the Web, and for speed

By John Cox on Tue, 02/17/09 - 9:13am.

[this is a repost of a news story elsewhere on our site]

The newest enduser mobile browser is Bitstream’s Bolt, targeted at just about any mobile phone that can support Java. It marries a full HTML rendering engine with Bitstream’s font magnification and data compression features.

The new browser is based on Bitstream's carrier-focused Thunderhawk mobile browser, which uses a client-server model to improve Web performance.

At Mobile World Congress this week, Bitstream unveiled the public beta test release of Bolt, which is based on the WebKit rendering engine: like a desktop browser, it can display standard Web sites, though not Flash content. It can be downloaded to any mobile phone that has Java’s Mobile Information Device Profile, a runtime environment for handhelds.

That covers a lot of devices, typically phones offered by GSM carriers such as T-Mobile and AT&T in the U.S. And they can be very basic, so-called feature phones, as long as they have 15k of storage for the application code and 500k of RAM to run it.

Bitstream, based in Cambridge, Mass., had previously released the Bolt code as part of a private beta test, albeit with 30,000 participants.

Bolt is the latest in a series of mobile browsers that can access and display the same Web sites designed for desktop browsers. Others include the mobile Safari version on the Apple iPhone, Opera Mobile and the server-based Opera Mini, another server-based browser from startup Skyfire, Nokia’s browser for its Symbian-based phones, and, still in development, Firefox for Mobile and Microsoft’s IE Mobile 6, which made a public debut at this week’s Congress with the unveiling of Windows Mobile 6.5.

The heart of the new browser is Bitstream’s Thunderhawk, introduced just over a year ago to carriers and device makers, who can white-label it as their own full-HTML mobile browser. Thunderhawk combines the WebKit engine with Bitstream’s font-rendering technology, which lets users select from 5 levels of magnification to view text and images in the browser. Users can see an entire Web page, select one section, and call it up in a patented magnified split-screen at the bottom of the handheld’s display.

A “smartbar” supports predictive URL entry, suggesting URLs based on history and favorites, with search launched from the smartbar with a single click.

Bolt supports streaming Flash video (but not Flash), XML, Javascript and Ajax (but not Ajax timer events). It relies on 128-bit Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) encryption for secure Web page access. Server-based filtering is a feature intended to protect users from malware.

The browser is a client-server application: using servers to do a lot of the heavy lifting involved in transcoding multimedia content and compressing images and data to minimize bandwidth use. One side benefit: because the handset does less work during browsing, there’s less demand on the battery.

Bitstream’s compression technology promises to dramatically speed up Web downloads, typically by 25% according to the company. The company cites its own tests that compare Website downloads between Bolt, mobile Safari 3.11 and Opera Mini 4.2. Downloading www.apple.com took Safari 16.9 seconds, Opera Mini 9.42, and Bolt 7.17, a pattern repeated with an array of other sites.

Bolt supports the 3gp video format intended for mobile phones. Embedded 3gp data is sent directly to the handset. Otherwise, Bolt’s server component transcodes the video on the fly into 3gp before sending it downstream. Depending on the device, the video can be played in the Bolt browser window or through the handset’s native media player and browser.