Okay, so I’m a little late to this one. It was a hectic weekend and I didn’t get much of a chance to do anything BlackBerry related (two flights in three days will do that). When I got home on Monday, though, I went ahead and downloaded the ballyhooed BOLT browser for BlackBerry. It’s been much-hyped, and after reading up about it I thought it could bring a new dynamic to the BlackBerry browsing experience. After the jump, a couple of thoughts followed by a list of places you can download it.
First off, keep in mind that this is a beta, and a private beta at that. There are going to be bugs, and some of them might tick you off. Like the one you see to your right. Frequently, when manually entering addresses, I’ll encounter an error which will force me to reconnect BOLT. It’s not a huge deal, just a nuisance. Make sure you send the error to them so they can try to fix it for the official release.
Also, the cursor doesn’t move fast at all, much slower than the default browser. This can be a pain for long pages (like BBGeeks.com). When this problem comes up in the default browser I usually advance one page by hitting the space bar. However, that does not work in BOLT. Hopefully both of these issues are resolved for the official release. Also, there is no options page, though the main menu is full of ways you can customize your browsing experience.
The best part is that BOLT renders websites just as you’d see them on the Web. This can be a bit of a problem at times, specifically when the page is wide and you have to scroll over. There is no scroll bar by default, only when you’re actually scrolling, so there’s no way to tell if there’s more content hidden on the right side of the screen. If the cursor moved a bit faster, I don’t think that would be as much of a problem.
If you want to give the new browser a whirl, you can get it from the following outlets:
BlackBerry Cool
BerryReview
CrackBerry.
And, to keep you occupied, here’s CrackBerry’s video preview:
