Well what so you know, BitStream decided to kill its Bolt Browser. The company issued the following statement:
The free BOLT mobile browsing service will be discontinued. Unfortunately, the economic circumstances prevent us from running a free service going forward. We apologize for any inconvenience and thank you for your loyalty and support.
The way I see it, BitStream had a problem with sales. They did have a good product which was capable enough to compete with Opera Mini (market leader). However, they haven’t managed to convince any major handset maker nor mobile operator to try them out.
Now if I were at some major handset maker I would want to have such an app pre-installed on feature phones I’m selling. I’m talking about companies like Samsung and LG, which sell an array of feature phones and which could benefit from acquiring BitStream to offer their own browser, instead of licensing it from third parties for every phone they sell. There’s an idea…