Hi
The advantage to a front-end with TradeBolt is automation. If you're running a strategy with TradeBolt against a manual system, TradeBolt will react to the market automatically based on pre-programmed decisions in the strategy. If you're trading by hand, you have to watch the market, make a decision, and click a button, which is nowhere near as fast as TradeBolt's automation.
Manual trading with any system is going to be slower than an automated strategy. TradeBolt's manual trading takes several mouse-clicks, as does trading with IB. That said, manual trading is not what TradeBolt is about.
Thanks