Bitstream pushes to get BOLT mobile browser put on more phones before shipping

Bitstream is the software company that maintains the BOLT mobile browser – one of the two major independent mobile browsers available. Not content with just getting user downloads (1 million installs by the middle of last year, now up to nearly 4 million), Bitstream really wants to get BOLT pre-loaded on mobile devices by original equipment manufactureres (OEMs). To further that goal, today it announces the launch of a special OEM version of the browser.

BOLT has a couple of selling points that make it worth looking at for mobile phone makers. First, it really is genuinely fast. Second, it will run on pretty much any mobile phone. Third, it’s already been chosen by an OEM. After extensive testing, European manufacturer Visual Fan signed a pre-load deal with BOLT. The reason it gave was that on top of BOLT being fast and light, it worked across the entire catalogue of Visual Fan devices.

What’s the new version?

Bitstream claims that the new BOLT OEM edition has been optimised for mobile handset manufacturers. The browser has been tweaked to make it easy to install on a massive variety of phones, and to cloud-host a lot of the architecture that it requires to work – in other words, BOLT is trying to take as much work as it can to make it as easy as possible for an OEM to pre-load and run this browser on its devices. The “cloud-hosting” aspect is pretty much the core of the entire BOLT offering. If you view a web page through BOLT, it renders web pages on its servers first, and optimizes them for your mobile device, whatever it is. Then it sends you the rendered version… and all of this takes less time that it would for your phone to process that data on its own.

The browser is being released for OEMs in four different editions – from the full browser down to an extremely pared-down version for extremely resource-light devices.

This news is being released now because Bitstream is planning a lot of meetings with OEMs at Mobile World Congress.

Anna Magliocco-Chagnon, president and CEO of Bitstream said that “in the last twelve months since Bitstream unveiled BOLT we’ve been able to complete a worldwide public beta testing and watched carefully as the browser was downloaded over 3.8 million times, making refinements and further optimizing the BOLT OEM edition. Since we launched BOLT at last year’s Mobile World Congress, it has won industry awards and more importantly, praise from users and in application reviews. BOLT is now being preloaded by mobile device manufacturers in Europe and Asia, and Bitstream is receiving interest from device manufacturers and wireless operators around the world.”

What we think?

I’ve been following BOLT and Bitstream since I got this job, and I’ve always liked their boggle. But independent mobile browsers will always face the problem of redundancy – phones tend to ship with mobile browsers already installed these days. You really need to have a hot proposition just to attract peoples attention. Even then you’re competing with people like Opera and Firefox who want to move their on-line internet properties onto the mobile web. So pushing hard into the OEM strikes me as a really excellent idea from Bitstream.