UPDATE: WOW, just got word from Bitstream that you guys brought down their servers! They’re upgrading them now for higher capacity, so if you received an error when trying to sign up, wait a while and try again!
When we wrangled the BlackBerry Nation 500 invites for the BOLT BlackBerry Browser private beta yesterday, we weren’t sure how interested you’d be. It turns out that you were very interested — Bitstream, makers of BOLT had quadrupled our invites to 2000, and that still wasn’t enough! So after a little bit of negotiating, we’ve gotten them to give us some more invites.
To get your copy of the BOLT beta, you must head on over to their download page and use the following referral code: ‘berrycool’. Do this even if you had already sent a request previously. Bitstream has now automated the request process, meaning you should get an email with the download link much quicker now.
While you’re waiting to get your dirty little mitts on that email, don’t forget to check out our hands-on BOLT browser impressions. Get to it!
Any one else getting site errors when trying to submit?
if you are getting an error it’s because BlackBerry Cool just brought their server down due to capacity! They’re upgrading the server now, so try again in a little bit.
Man, when you guys want something, you want something!
Yes…site is busy.
It’s up but submitting gets an error
Yea i been getting error over and over again until i saw that they crashed the servers. Guess ill keep trying.
Yep, I try to submit the form and get an access denied page. ugh.
I cannot submit form either
Forbidden
You don’t have permission to access /cgi-bin/dcgi on this server.
i keep getting denied page!!
i been at this since yesterday!
I am getting a “Forbidden: You don’t have permission to access /cgi-bin/dcgi on this server” error page.
This is John Sidline of the Bitstream PR team. I want to first thank the readers of BlackBerry Cool for their enthusiastic response to the BOLT browser. But I also need to let readers know the status of the private beta program now underway. We completely underestimated the response we’d get to the beta. Initially we had a manual process in place to distrubte download links. But we were quickly overwhelmed by requests for BOLT so we switched to an automated process at about 9:00 AM Eastern today. Sometime after noon Eastern today, the server handling the downloads “blew up.” We are now in the process of switching over to a dedicated server we’re confident can handle the demand. We appreciate everyone’s patience. We expect the new server to be online by 4:00 PM Eastern today. Also, to those who have already downloaded BOLT, a big thank you. From feedback we’ve received just since yesterday we’ve already made improvements to BOLT, and our beta is only about 24 hours old.
how can I get in?
Got the email from Bolt but the link is forbidden and their support email is down also.
i was lucky enough to get an invite…wow! it’s friggin’ awesome!!!
wow im actually really impressed with this! to think its just a beta! cant wait to see what happens next!
Anyone else try bolt on a BB Curve 8320? My initial impression is that bolt isn’t usable on my phone. Its painfully slow and just moving down the page is an ordeal.
i have it on my 8330. i found using the trackball was time consuming but you can use x to make it go down quicker, e to go up etc…
I got it now on my Storm. I will post updates on my experiences with Bolt on my blog: http://jasdever.blogspot.com and my twitter feed http://twitter.com/jasdever
I can get in and get the invite email, but it keeps telling me my download failed. Anyone know what I could be doing wrong? I am using the unsigned version. Help please!!!
I agree with review about this being unusable. It’s slow, not only in navigation of the mouse etc but also loading the pages.
AdoreMyFour i experienced the same thing with my invute. I was lucky enough to get one on both of my email addresses though. I tried the first invite about 10 times id say and than decided it was time to try the other. it didnt work the first time all it did was load for 5 mins and than say it failed so i decided to do a quick battery pull to see if it would help. So i tried after ther pull on my first invite and it worked perfecty. So i guess if you havent tried a pull than maybe you could lol.
I can’t get it working on my wife’s Pearl. It keeps saying Download failed. Any Pearl successes?
I have a pearl. Go to your I inbox, copy the unified link, paste it to your browser
I have a pearl. Go to your I inbox, copy the unverified link, paste it to your browser
I have it installed but it doesn’t work
I installed it, got it to work. It’s ok. Did a practical test accessing the desktop version of UPS.com on Bolt and Mini-Opera. Mini-Opera won hands down on usability and speed. I’ll try Bolt again when it matures …
So, I installed this on my Curve 8310. Although it does look very nice, and I imagine others are having a good experience, I would highly suggest not using this on an 8310. It is completely unusable on this model. The menu and scrolling is so lagged, that it takes far longer to do anything than with the bb browser or opera, simply because it takes so long to navigate.
If you have a higher end BB, go for it. It looks like it would be very nice. And having another browser is always a good thing.
Installed BOLT on my BB Curve 8330.Though pages load quick, see it as useless at present since it is ‘oh so painfully slow’ to navigate web pages. And can’t copy-n-paste an URL. Seems more like an Alpha than a Beta release.
so far I’m not a fan. I don’t like that there is no search function. By default if you type something into the part where you typically enter the url, it does a google search but I’d like to also be able to search wikipedia and imdb among other sites more easily. Like others have been saying it loads pages very slowly and it’s a pain to navigate around pages. if you try to view videos it loads them throught the blackberry media player. Not bad for a beta, but not perfect. I’ve used the Skyfire beta for wm devices and can’t wait for it to be ready for the bb.
Hi
We wanted to take a moment to extend our personal thanks for all of the blog users on blackberrycool.com that have tested our BOLT browser. BOLT is our latest entry into the mobile browsing space and this is the first time that we have launched a private beta through the use of blogs. The response has been outstanding! As you may have seen, we have received so many responses in a few short days that it overloaded our registration process. On Friday, we were able to build an automated process that continued to be stressed by the sheer volume of requests happening every minute. The great news is that we were able to expand the number of invites so many more of you could participate.
We have received countless emails providing extremely valuable feedback, feature requests, and favorable comments on the experience. The private beta build was created to allow people with J2ME phones to browse and for us to get real world feedback. Given the monumental response from Blackberry users, we are already working on Blackberry-specific improvements recommended by bloggers to greatly improve the experience on Blackberry devices given the demand. An example of this is improving the use of specific hardware keys found on Blackberries. As many of us are Blackberry users, we completely understand the benefit such improvements will provide.
Although many reported that BOLT is very fast, we also heard that some users were having speed issues. Earlier today, we made some improvements to our backend servers to improve the speed of delivery of pages to you so pages should load even faster than before. If you were having difficulty earlier, we would encourage you to test again and see what happens. Then let us know if this has improved the speed on your device.
We encourage you to continue to provide your feedback to us either by posting or by sending an email to support@boltbrowser.com for support issues. You can also email contact@boltbrowser.com for any other matters. Our team is making every effort to respond to all of your inquiries as soon as possible. As you can imagine, this is keeping us quite busy given the volume of email we are getting. Over the coming days, you may also see posts from our team on certain technical issues. Although it will be difficult to respond to everyone who has posted, we will post information for everyone to see on common issues.
We hope that none of you were unable to participate due to our launch issues, as that was not our intention. If you have not received your software, please sign up again at http://www.boltbrowser.com and you should receive the download very shortly.
Thank you for being a part of our private beta launch! We look forward to hearing your feedback! You are the most valuable part of our beta process!
With your help, we hope to make BOLT the best mobile browser on the market today.
Anna and the BOLT team
Anna Chagnon
President and CEO
Bitstream Inc.
Given the extremely large number of users that wanted to try BOLT, we experienced some delays in processing key requests. We have worked through the weekend and emails are on their way to you. You can also ensure a key by filing our the form again at http://www.boltbrowser.com/download.html. Bitstream support is giving their utmost attention to all requests.
Thanks,
BOLT Beta Support Team at Bitstream
support@boltbrowser.com
I wish the Bolt folks would say how to disable capitalization for the first letter. When I put in a log in or a password, Bolt capitalizes the first letter and that’s no good for me as my sign on’s are all lower case. Bolt support team: you have a great browser in the making. Now please tell how to disable the auto cap feature of the first letter position when typing in a user name or password. Thanks.
Viewpoint changes may happen every few minutes to aid study, but not con- tinually. ,
Questions to Ponder: Although there is no blueprint for creating a student success-oriented institution, adapting these principles is likely to make a difference in terms of student learning. ,