Bitstream Inc. announced commercial availability of the second generation of its acclaimed BOLT mobile browser. BOLT 2.1 marks the completion of beta testing on the most fully featured browser available for mobile phones of all types. Among BOLT 2.1’s new features are tighter integration with Facebook and support for HTML5 video as well as several new Flash video streaming websites.

“In just a few years it is expected that more people will be using the Internet on mobile devices than from desktop computers,” said Anna Magliocco-Chagnon, CEO of Bitstream. “Bitstream has engineered BOLT to maximize the utility of the Internet on mobile for end users, give handset manufacturers an important competitive differentiator for their mobile phone lines, and provide mobile network operators another way to compete for new users as well as to better manage the data usage on their networks. Bitstream has always believed there should be a singular entity called the Internet, as opposed to a desktop iteration alongside a lighter, less functional mobile version.”

An April 2010 report from the analyst firm Morgan Stanley found that video accounts for 69 percent of all mobile data traffic worldwide. With the inclusion of HTML5 video, the BOLT mobile browser now provides the industry’s broadest video support. HTML5 video is a new standard for delivering streaming video via an Internet browser without requiring an external plug-in. Though a relatively new standard, a study released this month by the video aggregator and search firm MeFeedia found that 26 percent of online video available is today already encoded for HTML5. Through the use of BOLT, users can watch HTML5 videos on any website on which they appear.

BOLT 2.1, Bitstream offers the largest selection of Flash video support available on all categories of mobile phones, adding mtv.com, nick.com, bbc.co.uk (UK), maniatv.com, svtplay.se (Sweden), hungama.com (India) and bollywoodhungama.com (India) to a list that already included youtube.com, cnn.com, espn.com, video.google.com, video.yahoo.com, vids.myspace.com, blip.tv, dailymotion.com, metacafe.com, rutube.ru and www.mocospace.com.

BOLT 2.1’s advanced integration with Facebook – by far the most popular domain visited by BOLT users around the world – includes the ability to use Facebook’s instant messaging service and to seamlessly copy text or links and post them to a Facebook account directly from within the BOLT browser. The most important new feature of BOLT 2.1 is tabbed browsing which gives people the ability to simultaneously browse multiple websites and easily switch between them, a functionality that was a top request from BOLT users. Additional notable upgrades in BOLT 2.1 include a faster widget gallery with updated user interface and a server upgrade to WebKit 4.03, keeping BOLT up-to-date with the latest Web standards.

BOLT has been installed nearly 7 million times since its debut in February 2009. Over the past few months, more than 30,000 users installed the consumer version of BOLT each day, while hundreds of thousands of people began using pre-installed versions of BOLT on newly available devices from Bitstream’s OEM partners in Asia and Eastern Europe.

The BOLT mobile browser is engineered to run on mobile phones of all types, from low-end feature phones to high-end smartphones. BOLT has been installed on thousands of different handset models running on hundreds of networks worldwide. BOLT is the only major WebKit-based cloud computing browser and is built to deliver a PC-like browsing experience on mobile phones. Its small package, easy integration and comprehensive feature set make it ideal for handset manufacturers and mobile network operators to offer the best possible Internet experience for users of the widest range of mobile device categories. Co-branding and white labeling opportunities make BOLT especially attractive to OEMs and mobile network operators who will benefit from BOLT’s many advantages, including:

OEMs:

• Can offer more appealing product lines to operators with mobile devices that provide full-featured browsing, multimedia, widgets and advanced social networking support on all levels of mobile devices.
• BOLT’s WebKit based cloud-computing architecture enables efficient use of on-device resources.
• BOLT is presently available in J2ME and Brew versions, with English, Spanish, Romanian and Russian user interfaces. OEMs can request BOLT in other platforms as well.
• A 153k Lite™ version of BOLT is available for extremely resource-constrained devices.

Mobile Network Operators

• The BOLT mobile browser delivers PC-style browsing, multimedia streaming, widget downloads, and social networking that increase ARPU while lowering operator cost.
• BOLT reduces infrastructure costs through best-of-breed over-the-air data compression that is as much as 24:1, a factor more than twice as effective as competing mobile browsers. BOLT’s superior data compression offers the additional benefit of speedy performance on 2G networks and entry-level devices.
• Customizable widgets and featured favorites offer new revenue-generating opportunities.
• BOLT’s WebKit based cloud-computing architecture allows for easy scaling to hundreds of millions of users, and beyond.
• Flexible, cost-effective deployment options with Bitstream managing all server/cloud maintenance.

BOLT is the most fully featured mobile browser, including many features not available in competing mobile browsers. Among these features are:

• Perfect rendering of Web pages on any class of phone, scoring 100 percent on the Web Standard’s project Acid3 test.
• WebKit based cloud-computing architecture, ensuring rendering accuracy, speed and support for the latest Web standards and innovations.
• The broadest streaming video support of any mobile browser.
• Super fast download speeds.
• Copy and pasting text.
• Built-in integration with Twitter and Facebook.
• Password manager.
• Download/Upload manager.
• Ability to run Web-based applications written in Ajax, Javascript and other Web programming languages, ranging from Google docs to Mafia Wars.
• The inclusion of widgets – standalone mobile applications that are run directly from the browser – such as a weather app, calendar app, calculator, Twitter client and others. These widgets let people using any phone take part in the mobile apps revolution.
• Best of breed over-the-air data compression, resulting in faster load times and decreased data usage.
• Ability to update the BOLT client remotely, over-the-air.
• Patented split screen viewing to make surfing complicated Web pages simple, and viewing content on the smallest of screens easy.

Changes in how data plans are offered mean more people than ever are buying mobile data on usage-based plans. BOLT’s cloud computing architecture compresses Web and multimedia content by as much as a factor of 24:1 before sending it to the mobile phone. This use of compression means that end users can load websites significantly faster and consume as little as 4 percent of the data as they would on other mobile browsers. As usage-based data plans proliferate together with mobile Internet use, phones that reduce data usage while delivering a superior Web experience will become in higher demand by consumers worldwide. Utilizing such compression makes BOLT of interest to mobile operators who seek to better manage the use of data on their networks.

Bitstream has made BOLT extremely easy to use with keypad shortcuts to quickly navigate pages and scale up and down through the browser’s six levels of magnification. Comprehensive instructions on how to use all of BOLT’s many features can be found at http://boltbrowser.com/faq.html.

BOLT 2.1 and BOLT Lite is available for free at http://boltbrowser.com. Consumers who have downloaded previous versions of BOLT will be prompted through the application to upgrade the browser.