Mobile browsing has been around for years. Thanks to smartphones, however—the iPhone in particular—the technology's now an essential element for nearly all but the most basic of cell phones. One recent wireless Web success story arrives courtesy of Bitstream, which released the first beta edition of its Bolt browser about four months ago.

This week, Bitstream announced the millionth install of Bolt (now in Beta 2) since its debut. As a J2ME (Java Mobile Edition) application, Bolt is built to be used on a wide range of mobile phones—from simple feature phones to more advanced devices, such as the BlackBerry.

PDAStreet in Bolt - Normal Mode

Today, PDAStreet spoke to Bitstream CEO Anna Chagon about this milestone. She also commented on what her company's been able to glean from Bolt's usage patterns and what users should expect in a future version of the browser.

"In January we began our private beta and within a couple weeks we had 30,000 beta testers, a number far beyond our wildest expectations for that short a time frame," Chagnon told PDAStreet. She believes "this quick pace of adoption is indicative of people using their mobile phones as Internet devices; in some cases the mobile phone is a person's primary Internet device."

Bolt’s success isn’t all a result of the market though, asserts Chagnon, who added that "although we're addressing a marketplace where our potential install base will be counted in the billions, the fact that Bolt was installed more than a million times in just four months is a sign we've built a special mobile browser that has consumer appeal."

Usage Patterns
Since its introduction, Bolt users have consumed more than 22 terabytes of data from 61 million web pages. According to Bitstream, more than 20 percent of Bolt users spend 30 minutes surfing the Internet per session, with more than half of those spending more than an hour per session.

Bitsream found that people around the world are using their mobile phones to access the Internet for the same reasons, with consistent similarities in usage across cultures. Social networking, email, searches and videos are the top uses of Bolt no matter what country.

internet.com in Bolt - Normal Mode

"It's very interesting to see how similar people are around the world through the lens of the mobile Internet. We can look at what websites are visited using Bolt and examine that data on a global, regional and per-country basis," explained Chagnon. "The websites may be different, but the usage is the same."

In North America, for instance, Facebook is extremely popular while in India the Orkut social network is also a top five Bolt website.

Bitstream's analysis of Bolt usage patterns magnifies the differences between mobile markets as much as the similarities. "For example," according to Chagnon, "in North America our user population has a very large percentage of smartphone users. In India the ratio is exactly the opposite with a great many more feature phones using Bolt."

In Europe the ratio is more balanced with large populations of smartphone and feature phone users.

"I think what we're seeing with this data is that in some places like India, the acceptance of the mobile phone as a device for accessing the Internet is more mature, and people are more accustomed to installing mobile applications on their phones," Chagnon said.

The Future
Chagon had this to say about we should expect from the next Bolt beta:

"The engineering team at Bitstream is paying close attention to what our users are telling us both in terms of refining existing features and also adding new features. Since social networking has quickly become one the main uses of Bolt, we want to make using social networks easier in our next release."

So, according to Chagon, making text entry easier and the ability to upload files to websites are high on Bitstream's to-do list for Bolt.

"We're also working diligently to improve the speed of our browser, and its ability to handle complex webpages with lots of media on them," Chagon added. When we release it, the next version of Bolt will be the most fully-featured mobile browser for mass market phones."

Bolt is available for free to anyone as part of its public beta test. See here to download the program.