BOLT mobile browser reaches the million download mark

Bitstream has announced today that its BOLT mobile browser has now been downloaded and installed 1 million times – five months after entering public beta. Along with this announcement, BOLT has released a few metrics showing how mobile Internet users surf using the browser.

Here’s the stats that Biststream released:
BOLT browsers have used over 22,000 gigabytes of data from 61 million web pages.
Over 20% of BOLT browsers spend 30 minutes on-line per mobile Web session, with 50% of those spending more than an hour.
Social networking, search, web-based email and video websites are top ten destinations all around the world.
BOLT is particularly geared towards video streaming – of the total bandwidth used by all BOLT users, nearly one third was used by streaming video.

You can test BOLT for free at http://boltbrowser.com

From the release:

“It’s been fascinating to see the similarities in how BOLT is being used by people all over the world, despite different geographies, languages and cultures,” said Anna Chagnon, president and CEO of Bitstream. “For example, social networking is extremely popular all around the world. In some countries Facebook is the number one website visited by BOLT users, while in other countries Orkut leads. Even though the web destinations may be different, the usage patterns are strikingly similar all over the globe.”

What we think?

This is interesting. Skyfire announced that it passed the one million mark in May – so it would look like Skyfire is doing better. However, Skyfire only runs on Windows Mobile and Symbian S60 devices. Blackberry support has been announced, but it’s not here yet. BOLT will work on any phone with Java support (including Palm Pre), and has specific Blackberry and Windows Mobile versions as well. So the potential market for BOLT is far, far larger. So, yes, Skyfire hit the one million mark almost a month ahead of BOLT. But I’m very interested to see how this develops over the next few months.