Today, the BOLT Mobile Browser for Android is exiting its private beta period and becoming commercially available. The new version, BOLT 3.0, continues to offer the increased speeds and social features the browser has become known for, including the integrated Web apps and built-in Facebook integration.
For those unaware, BOLT is a popular WebKit-based alternative browser which runs on Android phones and tablets. It’s known to be fast because of the way it compresses webpages to reduce data transfer speeds. Using a client/server architecture, BOLT claims speeds that are consistently 25-50% faster than its competitors. It also supports the playback of HTML5 and Flash videos (even if your particular device doesn’t support Flash), and it takes advantage of adaptive streaming technology to make that playback even quicker.
The browser has a social element, too, with included Web apps for services like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube and Wikipedia as well as something it calls the “Social Tab.” This feature lets BOLT users connect to Facebook so that information like websites, YouTube videos and status updates can be shared from the BOLT interface directly with the social network.
There are dozens of other features in BOLT, like support for RSS feeds, support for JavaScript, support for Facebook apps and games, pinch-to-zoom, copy/paste, keyboard shortcuts, desktop-style browsing and more. In the two years since its debut, BOLT has served over 6.5 billion pages and 244 million videos, the company says, and now claims “tens of millions” of users. The Android Market, however, shows just over 700,000 installs.
The new version of BOLT is available in the Android Market here.