Bitstream Inc, the company behind Bolt Browser, today announced that the upcoming version of its BOLT mobile browser viz Bolt 1.7 will include the ability to run Web applications, more commonly referred to as “widgets”. The new BOLT Browser with widgets will be introduced in beta as a part of the upcoming BOLT v1.7, which will be on display at the Mobile World Congress on Feb 15, 2010.
Although BOLT already runs many web applications written in Ajax, Javascript and other Web programming languages, like Mafia Wars (A Popular Facebook Game) and Google Docs, the new widgets will be installed directly within BOLT and thus loading and executing much faster. BOLT will come with some sample widgets initially but users will also be able to discover, select and install specific applications through the BOLT Widget Gallery. BOLT will display an list of all installed apps, allowing users to quickly find and use them directly within BOLT.
“As many of the recent mobile and wireless trade shows have demonstrated, mobile applications are part of the mainstream mobile experience,” said Sampo Kaasila, VP, R&D, Bitstream. “However, the vast majority of phones in use today are ‘feature phones’ not smartphones. Unfortunately for the users of these billions of feature phones, it isn’t easy to find, install and run mobile applications. By adding Web apps to BOLT, Bitstream is not only improving the usability of our mobile browser, we are also making it possible for literally billions of people to partake in the mobile apps revolution.”
BOLT is a server-assisted browser that has been shown to have the most accurate page rendering of any mobile browser in its class, receiving a perfect 100 percent in the Acid3 page rendering test. Using this same cloud computing technology to support Web applications allows BOLT to offer increased functionality to the broad spectrum of devices BOLT already runs on, even the most basic mobile phones. BOLT Web applications are written as standard W3C widgets , a standard with broad industry support.