Free Mobile Software – BOLT 0.94 Modded
Bolt Modded
There are several enhancements worth speaking of. First, it received a newer, even larger, 3XLarge character set. This uses huge characters – on my BlackBerry 8800 even bigger than those of Opera Mini. These characters, however, are Bitstream’s own ones; this means they don’t support non-Western characters either, unlike Opera Mini using the non-small character set. The Bitstream folks should consider using the dynamic replacement algorithm I’ve described in my Web Browser Internationalization Guide; that is, use the closest equivalent of each non-western character to be able to render at least non-cyrillic East-European languages like Polish or Czech – these languages remain pretty readable when the closest letter is used instead of their own original.
The new character set is a god-send for high-resolution (VGA / WVGA users); people with low-resolution screens (like QVGA) will very rarely (if ever) need it.
The new version is stated to be working (scrolling) much faster on the BlackBerry platform than the previous one. This is true: now, it takes far less time (3-6 seconds at most per page – first a quick page jump to right with “6″ and, then, fine-tuning with the scrollball) to correctly position the viewport over the real text body on my BB 8800. This is still somewhat slower than Opera Mini (where you, in most cases, don’t need to touch the scrollball at all – simply pressing 6, that is, right, nicely positions the viewport over the text) but is indeed a huge enhancement over the last version.
The Bitstream folks have also fixed the major DPReview forum rendering issues I’ve reported in my previous article. Now, I couldn’t find any DPReview forum post having too long rows, unlike with the previous version, not even when using the largest character set. The following two (VGA portrait ??“ note that the content is rendered OK on my QVGA Landscape BlackBerry 8800 as well) screenshots show this (original thread HERE; compare the shots with those of beta1):
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