Split screen is Bolt's take on zooming.
(Credit: Bitstream)We were impressed with the Opera Mini 5 beta browser, which came out in mid-September. At CTIA Wireless 2009, a smaller player, Bolt Browser, leaves its beta behind to chase after Opera's dominance as an alternative browser for Java phones.
We liked what we saw the first time we tested out Bolt as a beta (video review) on a Samsung Propel. Bolt's rendering felt truer than Opera Mini 4.2 on many sites, but it didn't seem faster. Now that Bolt has shucked off its beta, we find performance essentially unchanged.
True, Bolt has undergone some cosmetic alterations, such as a Google search box that's separate from the URL bar, and a welcome download manager that lets you download files as well as upload. It also caches pages now, so you can jump back to the previous page without reloading it. Bolt 1.5's new video manager selects the best of three delivery mechanisms for streaming video on your device, including triggering your media player if the phone isn't well equipped for playback.
But what of those speed claims? Bolt, a proxy browser built on Webkit, now claims that it's about 15 percent faster than before and compresses data at a 23:1 ratio. In other words, 2.3MB from the Web shrinks down to 100KB. That may be, but we pulled up our online stopwatch to run our own surf tests.
Without ever budging from our roost, we tested navigation three times on each of three sites, keeping the routine the same for Bolt 1.5 and Opera Mini 4.2. We would have thrown Opera Mini 5 beta into the mix, but it didn't seem compatible yet with our testing phone, a Samsung Propel on AT&T's 3G network. We're telling you this because we know what a difference carrier, data strength, and handset type makes in each user's result. Were you to run the same test, you might get slightly different numbers.
Bolt took 12-14 seconds to load and navigate on Nordstrom.com versus Opera Mini's 9-13 seconds. It took 26 seconds to load The New York Times site and two other stories on Bolt. On Opera, the same stories loaded in 19, 11, and 10 seconds. Yelp was about the same for Bolt 1.5 and Opera Mini 4.2, about 14 seconds, but one Bolt page ran 2 seconds slower. Our tests clearly favor Opera Mini for speed, but there are one or two other caveats and clarifications to consider before declaring an all-around winner.
First, Bolt renders pages more faithfully than Opera Mini, with sharper text and photos, and with all the photos intact. Opera Mini 4.2 tended to overly compress some, but it bought it speed. On some sites, Opera Mini stripped an image or two out, or the photo footprints drastically condensed. Bolt also has an interesting feature that Opera doesn't--the capability to split the screen. This is essentially Bolt's zoom feature. As you pass the cursor over the zoomed-out section up top, the same area is zoomed in below. The 5 key toggles split-screen view on and off.
So which Java browser prevails overall? It's a tough call: Bolt renders graphics more clearly, but Opera was speedier. We'll see if these numbers continue to stand up when Opera Mini 5 comes out of beta. In the meantime, try them both out and chime in with your own views. You may find that a few seconds are worth it to you to use Bolt's interface. Maybe speed is all that matters and you'll stick with Opera Mini for now. You tell us.
Bolt browser 1.5 is free to download. BlackBerry owners should download the optimized version for BlackBerry phones, which integrates RIM's typical operating system shortcuts.
Bitstream launched the public beta of its Bolt mobile browser about a month ago at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain. Since then, the browser for Java-enabled phones, like BlackBerry and Nokia handsets, has attracted almost 300,000 beta users and rendered over 15 million pages.
Bolt's browser doesn't look like a game-changer, at least not compared with Skyfire when it first emerged to hungrily eye Opera's established market share. Bolt's basic interface tends toward the spare, with an address bar up top, three tabs to reach your history, favorites (which include presets to get you started), and feeds. After that, most navigation takes place from the menu key pop-up. Navigating with the soft key isn't a bad method for quickly jumping to favorites or clearing cookies, and there are currently no submenus in Bolt to delay you, though there is some scrolling.
(Credit:
Bitstream)
Despite being the youngster in a fast-developing mobile-browsing field with some very strong players, Bolt browser has some highlights, and a couple of unique features going for it. For one thing, Bolt is very fast. The browser takes a long gulp as it renders the page, but after that, scrolling is smooth and relatively unbroken. After rendering speeds, video streaming is Bolt's biggest win. For the most part, the browser will stream transcoded videos from eight sites, like YouTube, ESPN, Google, and MySpace, on a range of Java phones, and standard-feature phones like the ubiquitous Motorola RAZR--not just on higher-end smartphones.
For some phones, like the BlackBerry, Bolt will download the video to the phone's native media player. This workaround is clearly less than ideal, but with it Bolt has combined Skyfire's in-app browsing with Opera Mini's video-routing to the media player.
Some of Bolt's other highlights include a "find in page" feature that highlights in-line text, and options to download images, clear cookies, and switch to and from mobile and desktop views. The split-screen feature is a unique way to magnify the page demarcated by a view box, as an alternative to zooming in or increasing the overall font size.
As for negatives, navigation was frequently sticky with BlackBerry's Pearl. Though you can type a search term and select "search," to initiate a default Google search, a single, integrated smart bar is absent here in Bolt--in Opera Mini, Opera Mobile, and Skyfire, the URL bar doubles as a search bar. A Home screen shortcut link would also be welcome in the Options menu, along with a conspicuous way to abort a page as it's loading. Bolt's Favorites list also behaved obstinately, with missing commands to reorder your faves and a bumpy editing process. These are areas that the nascent mobile browser will likely attend to throughout the beta period, and some we'll keep our eye on as Bolt develops and as Opera and Skyfire respond.
The open beta of Bolt browser is free to download after registering your e-mail address. Give it a try, and tell us your two cents--what do you think of Bolt compared with Opera Mini and Skyfire?
Bolt.com, best known as a video sharing site that didn't really catch on, has filed for bankruptcy and shut down. The site had been in acquisition talks with GoFish, which would have been able to cover the $10 million settlement in a copyright infringement case with Universal Music. Earlier this month, the acquisition fell through, and Bolt was essentially doomed.
But it was really MySpace, not YouTube or copyright woes, that struck the first blow to Bolt. Before it shifted its focus to video, Bolt was a teen-oriented social networking site in the days when Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg was probably getting beat up on a playground somewhere. You could create a profile, talk with other members in chat rooms and message boards (this was the pre-webcam era), and engage in other forms of 1998-vintage "interactivity," like online quizzes and polls.
Bolt circa 2001, thanks to the Internet Archive.
(Credit: The Internet Archive)I was a teen in the '90s and had a Bolt profile out of curiosity, but those were the days when Internet social networking was still a very restricted phenomenon for a number of reasons: first, it was still seen as "weird" (and from parents' perspectives, dangerous) for teenagers to be socializing online rather than in real life; and second, AOL was still a juggernaut in those days. Its chat rooms and message boards, not to mention Instant Messenger, were the go-to place for kids who didn't feel like doing their homework. Then there was the fact that chatting and message board posting was, thanks to the limitations of dial-up connections, more or less all you could do. The infectious draw of viral videos and streaming music was still out of reach for many.
The critical mass wasn't there, so there was no real bandwagon effect to help Bolt grow. Then MySpace came along with its originally music-focused model--if My Chemical Romance has a social networking profile, it can't be just for losers, right?--and online social networking lost much of its "a/s/l?" stigma (that's "age/sex/location," one of the Web's oldest pickup lines, for you newbies). Bolt probably could've found some way to "evolve" and get the word out, but it didn't--the video-site makeover flopped amid the current glut of YouTube clones.
- prev
- 1
- next
