This may be of more interest to industry types than the average phone shopper. But then again, I don't know what the news is.
Bitstream is the company behind the BOLT browser, which I wrote a brief review of a few weeks ago. The browser runs on phones of nearly all kinds, and the idea is the rapid delivery of full HTML to J2ME devices and smartphones alike. Throw in AJAX and flash, and it sounds pretty tasty. The product is in the beta stage right now, and it shows. I hope the seed is good - the concept is promising.
What I didn't know at the time of my BOLT review was that Bitstream is behind a host of technologies that will work in concert to accomplish their end-goal. ThunderHawk is their client/server-based compression mechanism, and Font Fusion is an engine for rendering industry-standard fonts in the best way possible.
What's most interesting to me, however, is their Panorama product; which I won't pretend to fully understand. Rather, I'll just copy-and-paste their own, concise description:
"[Panorama is] a line layout engine that enables the composition of text in all of the world's languages, through a single API. Bitstream Panorama includes support for positioning, substitution and rendering of characters in complex scripts such as Arabic and Indic."
Sounds to me like the simplification of localization issues for coders. Whether or not that is of interest to PhoneDog readers, I'm not sure. But I like what I've heard so far from Bitstream. They're approaching all phones and all people, while embracing industry standards. I consider that a good outlook. We'll see what they have to offer at MWC, and in the future here in the States.
