Posts Tagged ‘mobile phone’

Up until now we have seen Mozilla, Opera, Chrome and Internet Explorer competing with Apple Safari in the web browser market but now a new player named Bolt has also entered into the arena. Developed by Bitstream, the Bolt browser is aimed at offering fully fledged Internet browsing on low profile mobile phones. The beta version of Bolt is now available for download at boltbrowser.com.

Like Opera the Bistream has also got clusters of servers that are dedicated to fetch web pages and compress them into proprietary code so that they can be downloaded at the client side in no time, even if the phone’s processing speed is slow. According to Bitstream the compression used by them more intense as compared to the Opera’s compression and thus the Bolt’s operating speed is much better. The Bolt can be used on low-end mobile phones, not just high-end models like the HTC Touch HD, but does not sacrifices performance and functionality. It offers full Internet browsing experience and has got built-in streaming support for YouTube videos.

Bolt is based on Webkit, the same web engine that works behind Apple Safari but the Bolt introduces some unprecedented features like ‘split screen mode’. Apart from this the new browser has got all the standard functions such as favourites, history, RSS feeds, address bar, auto complete etc.

iBrowser is one of the third party web browsers for iPhone launched recently. As every third party iPhone browser features something special the iBrowser too claims to be a unique one. The special feature of this browser is that it allows the user to lock the screen orientation. This means that if you lock the screen in portrait mode then the orientation of the web page will not change even if you hold the Apple iPhone in landscape direction.

This is a very useful feature because most of the time it happens that even a slight change in the iPhone’s direction leads to change in the web site’s orientation. Normally this automatic screen directional change, found other smartphones like the T-Mobile G1 Google-phone or HTC models, is a major asset for users. However, web browsers that are sensitive to phone’s direction cause lots of trouble when the user is driving. The iBrowser can solve this issue and offer you irritation free web browsing. But like the other third party browsers the iBrowser too has its own limitations. It does not support multiple pages or tabbed browsing plus there is no support for bookmarks, history, emailing a link to a page, page zoom in and zoom out. Moreover you will not find any preferences for customising cookies and scripts.

If you can survive without these options then the iBrowser app is perhaps the best option. However, the Incognito and QuickSurf are still better than this because these two also support screen’s orientation locking technology and offer loads of extra features and capabilities.

Hot Browser is another third party application that claims itself as the best alternative to the Apple iPhone’s default web browser named Safari. The main attraction of the hot Browser is that it is sensitive to the shakes. Whenever the user shakes the iPhone this browser loads a random web page automatically. The basic idea is same as of Sony Eicsson’s walkman phones, like the Sony-Ericsson W910i, in which every time the user shakes the mobile phone the music gets changed randomly.

Hot Browser may sound good and interesting but practically it is of no use. Most of the time the web site that gets loaded in response to the shake is boring and repeats itself a lot. Most of the users have noticed that there are six main websites that gets loaded and out of them two web sites are related to the programme’s author, i.e. Mark Schmatz IT. The remaining web sites are related to Ruby programming language and German language. So if you are thinking of getting YouTube movies, Yahoo, Google, MySpace or something like that then the Hot Browser is ready to disappoint you. Moreover all the basic web browsing tools like forward/backward buttons, history, bookmarks and preferences are absent.

The Hot Browser is more like an experiment with the iPhone rather than an effective alternate to the Safari browser. Alas! One more third party application seems to loose.