Nokia killed Symbian. Many links to Symbian apps on this site have expired. Check out Android Underground.



Monday 19 January 2009

New web browser Bolt: gatecrash the beta testing party

Bolt mobile phone web browser Symbian Java
Another mobile Java proxy based web browser. We have Opera Mini, TeaShark, Ucweb, and now we have Bolt.

Bolt compresses data traffic while maintaining the orginal layout of the full web page. It renders the pages reasonably well (better than Opera Mini), although it didn't manage to cascade pulldown menus, and Bolt shows bold and italic text as normal text instead. It has problems with web forms too, and it won't use T9 predictive text anywhere.

If you want the mobile version of a site instead, a trip to the settings menu gets you there.

Flash is supported, and so is flash video, although when I tested it on a YouTube clip I got low quality video without sound. Bolt doesn't handle video as well as Skyfire, but Bolt is much faster than its native Symbian competitor, and its user interface is much better and way more responsive. Bolt is not ready for the masses yet, but it looks promising enough to give it a shot.

Bolt is in closed beta testing, meaning it's only open by invitation. But you can gatecrash the beta test party if you dowload Bolt from Mobile Castle.

Bolt official website (beta test by invitation only)
Bolt 0.73 at Mobile Castle (open to everybody)


No comments: