Cloud-based mobile browser supports nine Indic languages

Details: James Barton; Category: Consumer Ecosystems; 03 December 2010; 6338 views

A new mobile browsing solution that fully supports Indic languages has been revealed by Bitstream. The new solution operates using the BOLT cloud computing browsing platform, and includes the BOLT mobile browser with Indic language user interfaces, the capability to perfectly render Indic text on a Web page, and the ability for end users to input Indic text into the browser...

BOLT is available in JavaME (also known as J2ME) and BREW, and can be used on mobile phones of all types, including those phones without native Indic language support.

The solution supports nine languages spoken as a first language by an estimated 1.3 billion people living in India and the surrounding regions, as well as English. The Indic languages supported by BOLT are Hindi (India’s official language), Bengali, Gurumukhi, Telugu, Tamil, Kannada, Gujarati, Malayalam, and Oriya.

“Interacting with Indic languages presents unique challenges on mobile devices,” said Lokesh Joshi, director of research and development at Bitstream India. “Indic characters are not independent from one another the way characters are in Latin alphabets. Each letter’s size and shape is determined by the characters that surround it, making it a very complex language to work with in a mobile context. Bitstream’s heritage is in font technologies, and we have perfected the ability to render Indic fonts on consumer electronics. With BOLT’s Indic solution for device manufacturers and mobile network operators, Bitstream has also perfected Indic rendering in mobile browsing.”

Other mobile browsing solutions address the challenges of Indic text by either imperfectly rendering the text or by displaying a static picture of a Web page. Imperfect rendering makes reading text difficult and affects the aesthetic of a website’s design. Although displaying a picture of the Web page solves the readability issue, it effectively eliminates the ability to manipulate the text and interact with the content. The BOLT Indic solution perfectly renders Indic text on a Web page, and allows users to scale text to larger or smaller sizes, copy and paste text from within a Web page, and interact with the content such as clicking embedded links or filling in Web forms.

BOLT is built for phones of all types, ranging from entry level handsets to smartphones, and offers users a variety of streaming audio and video available in a mobile browser, supporting both Flash and HTML5 video. It also includes many advanced features and social network integration, such as Twitter and Facebook widgets. Introduced last year, the free English language consumer version of BOLT is used by 3 million people in India; 14.5 million people use BOLT worldwide.

Anna Magliocco-Chagnon, CEO of Bitstream, commented: “With the addition of Indic language support, Bitstream is introducing the mobile Internet as it was intended to be seen to millions of new users in India and surrounding regions.”

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