BOLT 1.6

Bitstream's BOLT Web browser for BlackBerries and feature phones has come a long way in the six months since we . BOLT 1.6 has become a true competitor for our Editor's Choice, , offering fast rendering of desktop-quality pages, and a few tricks that Mini can't match. Its interface and compatibility still aren't quite up to Opera's standards, though, so Opera Mini 5 retains the title.

BOLT is a Java application that runs on BlackBerry OS smartphones, some feature phones, and some Windows Mobile phones. We tried it on a Verizon , a Sprint and an AT&T .

Speed and Performance
Like Opera Mini and , BOLT is a proxy browser. Your handheld isn't actually talking to the Web; it's talking to Bitstream's servers, which are downloading and compressing Web pages before forwarding them on to you. This approach works very well unless there's a stall in contacting Bitstream's servers, which we encountered twice in our testing, delaying pages between 30 seconds and a minute each time. Skyfire has had similar problems; we've never seen a problem contacting Opera's servers.

When it didn't glitch, BOLT was really fast. BOLT rendered most pages slightly faster than Opera Mini 5 did, with the occasional exception. Both BOLT and Opera Mini were at least twice as fast as the built-in BlackBerry browser on the Tour and Storm with JavaScript turned on—if the default browser rendered pages at all. Browsing speed got even better once I learned BOLT's several keyboard shortcuts for jumping within pages. Scrolling is clean and smooth.

BOLT's home screen has an address bar, a Google search bar, and options to access your history, favorites, and a list of RSS feeds. These options are entirely local—they don't sync with your desktop like Opera's, or require a sign-in like on Skyfire 1.5. The address bar has limited autocomplete.

Pages look good, and you see more of a page at once than you do in Opera Mini—in part because the default font size is really tiny. Bitstream says BOLT passes the Acid3 test, meaning it supports a wide range of page elements. As with other proxy browsers, though, beware DHTML, things like pop-up calendars and scrolling lists within pages. Sometimes those elements force a full page reload, and sometimes they don't work at all. Also, unlike Opera Mini 5, this is a single-window browser that doesn't support multiple pages at once.

The browser has a built-in RSS reader that captures feeds from pages (even if it initially gets their names wrong) and supports SSL, cookies, and even FTP downloads.

BOLT offers a few features Opera doesn't. Most notably, it streams media from various Web sites including YouTube (though not Hulu). YouTube videos on the BlackBerry Storm rebuffered frequently, but at least we got a gist of what's going on. Interactive Flash content is still AWOL, as it is on most mobile browsers. BOLT also loaded the desktop versions of pages such as ESPN.com that would only show their mobile sites to Opera Mini.

BOLT doesn't offer smooth zooming in and out of pages. Instead, it gives you two ways of changing your view. You'll find six levels of zoom buried in a Preferences menu. The zoom levels are clear and sharp, but awkward enough to get to that you won't want to change them too often. That's a pity, because the larger zoom levels really increase readability, but tend to make a little more horizontal scrolling necessary than I would prefer.

The other option is split-screen, which calls up a zoomed-out version of the page on the top two-thirds of the screen, with a zoomed-in version in the bottom third. There's nowhere near enough real estate on phone screens to make this usable for day-to-day browsing on most mobile devices, but it's great for getting where you need to go in a long page.

Compatibility Issues and Conclusions
BOLT was a pleasure to use on the Impact and Tour, but it was little infuriating on the Storm. The browser never automatically opens the touch keyboard, so entering text is always a three step process—click in a space, click menu, click Open Keyboard. That gets really old, really fast. Opera Mini knows when to open the keyboard, so we really recommend Mini for the Storm instead.

BOLT's overall UI isn't as slick as Opera Mini's—this browser goes for tiny text menus where Opera uses bold icons—and BOLT also doesn't seem to work on quite as many feature phones as Opera Mini does. Both browsers ran on AT&T's Pantech Impact, albeit with an annoying nag screen every time you loaded data—AT&T's fault, not the browser's. But BOLT couldn't load pages on Sprint's . And Opera powers the att.net browser installed by default on new AT&T feature phones like the , making it even more accessible to the masses.

BlackBerry and feature phone users now have two great options for alternative Web browsers. Opera Mini is sleek, clean, and beautiful. BOLT is a little rough around the edges, but can be even faster. In any case, there's no reason to keep using the awful built-in BlackBerry browser.

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