…

We have received countless emails providing extremely valuable feedback, feature requests, and favorable comments on the experience. The private beta build was created to allow people with J2ME phones to browse and for us to get real world feedback. Given the monumental response from Blackberry users, we are already working on Blackberry-specific improvements recommended by bloggers to greatly improve the experience on Blackberry devices given the demand. An example of this is improving the use of specific hardware keys found on Blackberries. As many of us are Blackberry users, we completely understand the benefit such improvements will provide.

Although many reported that BOLT is very fast, we also heard that some users were having speed issues. Earlier today, we made some improvements to our backend servers to improve the speed of delivery of pages to you so pages should load even faster than before. If you were having difficulty earlier, we would encourage you to test again and see what happens. Then let us know if this has improved the speed on your device.

We encourage you to continue to provide your feedback to us either by posting or by sending an email to support@boltbrowser.com for support issues. You can also email contact@boltbrowser.com for any other matters. Our team is making every effort to respond to all of your inquiries as soon as possible. As you can imagine, this is keeping us quite busy given the volume of email we are getting. Over the coming days, you may also see posts from our team on certain technical issues. Although it will be difficult to respond to everyone who has posted, we will post information for everyone to see on common issues.

We hope that none of you were unable to participate due to our launch issues, as that was not our intention. If you have not received your software, please sign up again at http://www.boltbrowser.com and you should receive the download very shortly.

Thank you for being a part of our private beta launch! We look forward to hearing your feedback! You are the most valuable part of our beta process!

With your help, we hope to make BOLT the best mobile browser on the market today.

Anna and the BOLT team

Anna Chagnon
President and CEO
Bitstream Inc.

My only concern, same as with SkyFire, is the business model: http://igorfaletski.com/2009/01/10/thinking-about-skyfire/

The “browsers” you heard about are just skins for Safari. It’s the same browser with a new look, basically.

I wanted to let you know a bit more about the status of the private beta program that is now underway. We completely underestimated the response we’d get to the beta. Initially we had a manual process in place to distribute download links to those with codes. However, we were quickly overwhelmed by requests so we switched to an automated process at about 9am Eastern today. Sometime after noon EST today, the server handling the downloads “blew up” – - literally! I kid you not. We are now in the process of switching over to a dedicated server that we are confident can handle the demand. We appreciate everyone’s patience. We expect the new server to be online by 4pm EST today.

Also, to those who have already downloaded BOLT, a HUGE thank you. Based on the feedback we’ve received just since yesterday we’ve already made improvements to BOLT, and our beta is only about 24 hours old.

So, thanks, and stand by for more good stuff to come!

I’ve read that I will get that choice too, as it seems fascistic Apple has just approved 3rd party browsers for the iPhone.

Nothing in my App Store yet though.
But waiting with bated breath… Safari sucks.

Smartphones, eh?

Most phones in the world are *NOT* smartphones. The market for a Java based browser is much bigger — HUGE — compared to the tiny smartphone market (in comparison).

http://www.canalys.com/pr/2008/r2008112.htm

Most phones in the rest of the world support Java. Maybe with the exception of Japan.

Using a proxy for compression and rendering is far from a deal breaker. It makes stuff faster and cheaper, and can offer browsing on slower phones.

And if you have a beefy phone capable of handling a full browser, you may still be paying for data, or you may not have a perfect network signal all the time.

If it gave you a “We’ll let you know when..” notice, you’re probably good to go. As I mentioned in the tail end of the post, they didn’t automate the process – the download link varies by handset, so they’re sending them out manually.

I’ll update the post as soon as I’m told the invites are gone.