Mobile browser BOLT to support Cyrillic alphabets
Bitstream (NASDAQ: BITS) today announced the availability of BOLT, the company's web browser for mobile phones of all types, to people in Russia and those reading languages in Cyrillic alphabets. BOLT, the first browser completely optimized for mobile phones, provides a desktop PC-like view of the Internet on virtually any mobile phone, from basic phones to smartphones.
BOLT was originally launched in February in Barcelona at Mobile World Congress with support for English and other Western European languages. Since that time BOLT has been installed over one million times, upgraded to include many important new features and has won the praise of media, bloggers and end-users all over the globe.
«Around the world people are discovering the power and potential of their mobile phones,» said Anna Chagnon, president and CEO of Bitstream. «People in CIS countries are among the most mobile-savvy in the world, with many SNG countries having mobile penetration rates exceeding 100 percent. People who use their phones for social networking, email, shopping, news and online gaming can now get a full-featured browser on their phones for free. With our Cyrillic font support, we expect BOLT to be as successful in this region as it is in North America, India and Western Europe.»
Optimized to conserve data transmission, BOLT features unrivaled speed – consistently at least 25 to 50 percent faster than competitors. BOLT offers streaming video, high standards compliance, rich media and graphics, enabling people to view websites on their mobile phones just as they do on a PC. BOLT is the only mobile browser that lets people enjoy streaming videos on the average mobile phone from such popular video services as RuTube, YouTube, vids.myspace.com, video.yahoo.com, blip.tv, dailymotion.com, metacafe.com and more.
Built with proprietary compression, navigation and rendering technologies, BOLT enables users to find and read information quickly and easily. Once users have navigated to the specific section of the large web page they are viewing, they can then zoom in to display clear text and images that look crisp on even small mobile phone screens.
BOLT's features include:
Recognizing that some mobile phones currently in use cannot support robust applications and some network providers limit the size of application downloads, BOLT is also available in a lightweight version, BOLT liteTM. BOLT lite contains all the essential features of the BOLT mobile browser, retaining BOLT's feature-rich functionality, best-of-breed download speeds and desktop PC-style page layout. BOLT lite's 140kb package has been optimized for entry-level devices by eliminating BOLT's non-critical features such as landscape and portrait orientation settings, inline videos, transport protocol settings, copy-paste operations, favorites organization, inline editing, find in page feature, and 3XL magnification. Both BOLT and BOLT lite include the additional language support in this release.
BOLT's Cyrillic font support faithfully renders web pages written in Cyrillic alphabets. With its heritage in software development and font technologies, Bitstream has built the BOLT mobile browser to scale text and images in six display sizes: small, medium, large, xl, xxl and 3xl. No other mobile browser for feature phones or BlackBerry smartphones can display or scale Cyrillic text with the size range or crisp clarity of BOLT.
«Bitstream expects BOLT to become very popular in Eastern Europe,» added Chagnon. «We specifically engineered BOLT to make it easy for people to use their mobile phones for social networking, searching, communicating and watching videos. Our users have validated our design, making Google, Orkut, Facebook, Gmail, Yahoo! Mail and YouTube the top sites viewed on BOLT.»
BOLT Usage:
The BOLT mobile browser has been installed more than 1 million times by people all over the world. BOLT has been installed on more than 1,000 mobile phone models from over 50 handset manufacturers.
People are spending a lot of time using BOLT. More than 20 percent of all BOLT sessions last longer than 30 minutes; more than 10 percent of all sessions last longer than one hour. One reason BOLT sessions last so long is that users are spending a lot of time social networking. Forty percent of all websites visited using BOLT are social networks. Depending on the geographic region, either Facebook or Orkut has been the most visited website by BOLT users.
The top destinations of BOLT users are:
BOLT and BOLT lite are available for free to anyone as part of Bitstream's public beta test. Visit http://boltbrowser.com to download BOLT today.
