Popular third-party browser BOLT has been discontinued according to the company's site. BOLT first made it's name on BlackBerry way back in 2009 as being a top third party browser with its speed and tabbed browsing when the native BlackBerry Browser was still lacking in features. It's definitely sad to see it go, but as the company stated on their site, they can no longer continue to support BOLT.

The free BOLT mobile browsing service will be discontinued. Unfortunately, the economic circumstances prevent us from running a free service going forward. We apologize for any inconvenience and thank you for your loyalty and support.  

So what say you? Are you sad to see BOLT go away for good? Or does the native browser suit you just fine? Hit the forums and let us know your thoughts!

Discuss more in the forums

Developers all around the world, take notes. Bitstream namely unveiled BOLT at the India Telecom exhibition as the first of its kind Web browser for mobile devices to include complete support for Indic languages. Definitely, this is an excellent move and great news for the mobile Indian population! Not only does BOLT support Hindi; India's official language, but it also supports Bengali, Gurumukhi, Telugu, Tamil, Kannada, Gujarati, Malayalam and Oriya. In other words, that is nine spoken languages in a single upgrade.

Bitstream has certainly outdone itself this time, but the support for additional languages is very, very welcome. Here is to hoping that other developers also begin globalizing their products - did you know that more than half of RIM's revenue comes from outside North America? Well, now you know ;-)

More information/download of BOLT

If you're not using a BlackBerry Torch, Curve 3G 9330 or a Bold 9650 running on BlackBerry 6 this might interest you. Bolt, has updated their 3rd party web browser with some great new features to make browsing on BlackBerry devices a better overall experience. The list of changes is as follows:

• New Advanced Desktop Features – Along with the ability to perfectly render Web pages as they were meant to be seen from a PC, BOLT also offers tabbed browsing, password manager, advanced downloading and uploading capabilities and now advanced inline text entry and editing allowing people to enter and edit text directly in Web page forms without opening up a separate text editing window.
• Backed up in the Cloud – BOLT 2.3’s new favorites backup feature stores a user’s bookmarks on BOLT’s servers, allowing them to be restored if a user ever needs to change phones for any reason.
• New Mobile Widgets – BOLT widgets let people using any mobile phone take part in the mobile apps revolution. Bolt 2.3′s widget gallery features weather, Wikipedia, and dictionary widgets, along with an improved Twitter widget and a brand new Facebook widget.

In addition to all of the above, Bolt has also added HTML 5 which adds to their already existing flash support. In some ways, this places Bolt ahead of browsers out there including the new WebKit browser loaded onto BlackBerry 6 devices. Thanks Josh!

• Click Here To Download Bolt For Your BlackBerry Smartphone Today>>

If you're already a user of Bitstream's Bolt Browser you should find this morning that it's advising you to go ahead and update to the latest release of 2.1. If you're new to Bolt, now may be the time to give it a test drive. Some new additions have been made to the overall application including updated Webkit installs server side for Bitstream to produce better rendering of webpages. Facebook enhancements have also been made as well, so now users can make use of Facebook chat right from within the browser. HTML5 support is onboard as well for such things as Youtube videos, along with a better tabbed browsing experience that has been there since 2.0. Some great changes  indeed for those looking for a better browsing experience. Be sure to update or download the latest from the Bolt website direct from your BlackBerry device.

• Download The Newest Release Of Bolt Browser Today >>

*UPDATE - The link for BOLT ver. 2.0 is now available, download here*

Kevin is currently in Las Vegas attending CTIA 2010 and sent us all off this little piece of information from the Showstoppers event there. What you see above in the pic is an early glimpse of what is to be BOLT 2.0. Releasing early tomorrow the new BOLT browser has many other upgrades coming with it aside from just tabbed browsing. Some new features have been added and plenty of upgrades have happened server side to enhance the browsing experience for users.

“Each new version of BOLT becomes more exciting to announce,” said Anna Magliocco-Chagnon, president and CEO of Bitstream.  “We are closely listening to our end-users through our user forum, our Twitter and Facebook pages, and their comments on blog posts and articles, and they are guiding our development roadmap in important ways.  It is this close relationship we are building with our users to which we attribute our stunning growth. BOLT added 1 million new users in the last five weeks alone.”

BOLT has upped the ante here for those looking for a better browsing experience on the BlackBerry platform. As most users are awaiting the webkit browser from Research In Motion, BOLT is offering that experience in one way or another right now. I certainly cannot wait to see how this latest version looks. Hit the jump for the full list of additional features added to version 2.0 of BOLT. We'll let you all know tomorrow when the 2.0 version goes live.

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Celebrating its first birthday, BOLT has been update to version 1.7 and brings alongs some new features. The third-party browser now supports wdigets, keyboard shortcuts for zooming on pages, Twitter integration (you can post updates to Twitter right from the browser) and more. BOLT has taken off since its initial release, and has surpassed 4 million users.

"Before we launched BOLT we knew that Bitstream engineers and developers built a remarkable foundation on which we could continue to evolve the BOLT mobile browser, and the positive support and constant feedback we received from a great many of our 4 million helped us prioritize the features and enhancements in each successive release. But as excited as we were for the first year of BOLT, the next year promises to be more dynamic as we plan to introduce features that took longer to engineer and we add more handset manufacturers to the roster of those preloading BOLT on mobile phones." 

BOLT's unique features include fast page loading, more accurate rendering, streaming videos, copy/paste text and six levels of magnification. The updates of BOLT seem to get better and better, so we can only expect more good things to come in the future. Check out boltbrowser.com from your device to download.

• More information and download of BOLT 1.7 >>