Bitstream today announced the availability of BOLT 1.6, the most fully-featured mobile browser available for mobile phones of all types. BOLT 1.6 delivers the industry-leading data compression ratio and offers the best website rendering, displaying full Web pages just as they appear on desktop computers. BOLT 1.6 outscores competing mobile browsers earning a perfect 100 percent on the Web Standards Project’s Acid3 test. The Acid3 test, created to help browser vendors ensure proper support for Web standards in their products, tests Web 2.0 dynamic Web applications and visual rendering, including Web fonts.

This newest release of BOLT includes a number of important design enhancements, as well as incremental improvements driven by BOLT’s users. For all mobile data networks that support it, BOLT 1.6 now offers full socket-based connectivity which can increase the page rendering speed of BOLT by as much as 15 percent. BOLT 1.6 also includes a new password manager, allowing usernames and passwords to be saved by the browser for easier and faster logins to users’ favorite websites and online applications.

Responding to a frequent request from BOLT’s BlackBerry smartphone users, BOLT 1.6 can now be set as the default browser on their smartphones. A version of BOLT created specifically for BlackBerry smartphones not only has all the features of BOLT, but also includes default BlackBerry shortcuts and optimizations.

Downloaded over 2.8 million times since its February 2009 debut, BOLT has also been selected by handset manufacturers around the world as the standard browser on new lines of mobile phones in production.

With advanced features like the ability to stream video from the most popular video websites, copy and paste, upload files such as photos and videos to websites, and order and arrange favorites into custom folders, BOLT is also the most fully-featured mobile browser. BOLT is able to operate on the widest variety of mobile phones – from feature phones to smartphones – running efficiently on an estimated 3 billion handsets already in the market.

BOLT’s Unique Capabilities Include:

• Best of breed page load speeds
• Most accurate page rendering
• Displays full websites just as they would appear on desktop computers
• Streams videos from popular video services such as YouTube
• Copy and paste text
• Uploads video and photo files directly to websites from browser
• Only major WebKit based cloud computing browser

Recognizing that some mobile phones currently in use cannot support robust applications and some network providers limit the size of application downloads, Bitstream created a light version of the BOLT mobile browser, BOLT lite^TM. 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 in a smaller package optimized for entry-level devices. BOLT and BOLT lite are both available for free download at http://boltbrowser.com.