Bolt browser : Opera you have a competition!

[amitabhishek]

After going reading this article in TOI-Sunday edition; I thought to give BOLT a spin and Man! was I impressed!!!

Bolt is written in J2ME and should work with any handset that support MIDP 2 and CLDC 1.0. To download it you can point your phone's native browser here.

First and foremost thing that struck me was the interface which I thought was very friendly. Surprisingly the sites that I visited using Bolt rendered their desktop version not the WAP one (e.g. Facebook, Twitter etc). The login and password fields remembered what I typed last time. Upon clicking them the browser allowed me to fill fields in the webpage itself rather than opening a SMS type of window (like Opera). This gave a true desktop like experience. Pressing 5 gives a minimap its different from Opera's minimap. I think you should try it to know the difference. Then there is 3 level zoom which is kind of cool!

Most of the sites that I tried opened without overlapping of text and images. Surprisingly I was able to "view" YouTube videos. Whenever you select a Youtube video Bolt trancodes it into 3gp and it plays on the bundled Real Player, just like you would play video from your phone's SD card. So in a way it actually downloads Youtube videos on you phone. Isn't this should be the single largest reason to try Bolt !!!

Since its only been couple of hours of me testing Bolt; will let you know if I stumble upon something new. As far as speed is concerned Opera still is the real "Usain Bolt" but our Bolt is not far behind. BTW my phone is Nokia E61i.

Another browser "Squace" in the same TOI article didn't impress me much. But then its just me, may be I missed something. Request you to try it out and post comment.

Happy Browsing!!


Amit

[alter_ego]

Looks nice! Worth a try.