[General Topics] Menneisyys:
I’ve already mentioned BOLT (essentially, a Java-based, enhanced version of the Windows Mobile-only Thunderhawk), which, with the version released at MWC, became pretty usable.

As I do most of my Web browsing on either my Blackberry 8800 (with a 80 Mbyte data plan only), it’s essential for me to be able to use a Web browser that works on the Blackberry (read: is Java-based) and uses as little data as usage (read: I can’t use the “full” Web browser coming with the operating system). Note that, as has also been explained HERE, when I plan to spend definitely more time with Web browsing (and not just check whether, for example, there’re any new, interesting, DH1-specific posts/news at, for example, the Panasonic forum of DPReview), I use my iPhone 3G for browsing instead of my BlackBerry.

Lately, I’ve played a lot with BOLT and directly compared it to Opera Mini.

To make a long story short, while BOLT is indeed getting pretty usable, it has some major glitches that make using it pretty awkward.

One of them is the slow text positioning on non-touchscreen devices like BlackBerries, Symbian or Windows Mobile Standard phones. Try making, for example, the center row of the DPRevie forums fill in most of the screen. Sometimes it takes at least 20-30 seconds to do this on my BlackBerry 8800. (Fortunately, after this, you won’t need to scroll horizontally any more and can quickly scroll up/down with 2/8/space. Unless you run into rendering problems, which are pretty common with BOLT, unfortunately.) With Opera Mini and its dynamic text aligmnent, it only takes 2-3 button presses on my BlackBerry to do the same, all taking no more than 1-2 seconds.

Another is the already-mentioned text reflowing / rendering problem. Generally, it can be safely stated that Opera Mini excels in text reflowing. I know of no page that it couldn’t render. Also, it excels at letting the user quickly position to the text he or she would like to read. Unfortunately, BOLT has some major rendering problems, which makes it far less usable than Opera Mini. An example of this is rendering the DPReview forums. Rendering the “Why Buy An LX3? It's Just Another P&S, Right?” thread in the Panasonic talk forum is as follows:

Landscape view on a VGA device, with XXLarge characters – as can clearly be seen, there is no need to scroll sideways

Switching to Portrait (and reloading the page) results in the text overflowing, necessitating some horizontal scrolling to read it all; that is, plain useless.

Like the above, but after enabling Select / Settings / Mobile View. As you can see, not much has changed – the text remained unreadable because of the need for horizontal scrolling.

It’s only reducing the character size that helps (now, switching to XLarge from XXLarge):

This, of course, makes the page even harder to read, particularly in cases when you do need large or huge characters (small VGA screen like that of Diamond; while commuting etc.). In this regard, Opera Mini is far better (and it makes text reflow excellently):

(For comparison, THIS screenshot shows Opera Mini rendering the same page – using the custom small character set; THIS is the same, but using large characters)

Another example of Opera Mini’s superior rendering engine can be found in the following two comparative screenshots (rendering THIS page):

(Opera Mini)

(BOLT)

Pay special attention to the bulleted list. Opera Mini is able to render it, even using its comparatively large character set, without any need for horizontal scrolling. BOLT, on the other hand, isn’t – even with enabled Mobile View mode and XLarge characters (as opposed to XXLarge, which, on a VGA device, is probably the best character size to stick with) only. It chops so much off the text that entire words remain invisible (see for example the word “large” after “rather” at the end of the row).

Of course, this would be far better in Landscape mode but there are always cases (for example, when you only have one hand to hold the phone or the screen has polarization issues in Landscape and you are sensitive to them) you’ll want to prefer Portrait mode. Also, you can always (further) decrease the character (zoom) size, but it’ll make the text even harder to read.

Incidentally, speaking of the W3C pages, I’ve also run the generic mobile W3C test (see THIS for more info). Here, BOLT proved to be comparatively good (there’re much worse mobile browsers in this respect; for example, Microsoft’s own Internet Explorer Mobile):

(OM)

(BOLT)

Note that there are some other disadvantages (and even some advantages like, currently, faster servers) of BOLT. I don’t elaborate on them here as the comparison chart lists most of them and if you read my past Web browsing-related articles, you’ll understand what these mean.

Nevertheless, BOLT is still a very nice browser. One can only hope the above-explained bugs will, sooner or later, be fixed, so that it becomes a decent alternative to Opera Mini. For the time, however, it’s better to stick with the latter, should you want to avoid wasting time on definitely not bugfixed or enhanced functionalities like horizontal scrolling and the lack of quick, automatic positioning to text columns.

Comparison chart

Note that I haven’t listed features that both browsers have; for example, in-page text searching.

(source HERE)