One of the abilities of smartphones I’ve always coveted is the ability to peek in at your torrents and see how they’re doing. Is that movie finished? Is anyone downloading that pack of videos I put up? These are questions that demand answers while you’re waiting in line at the coffee shop three minutes from your house. Well, Android has a promising young app called Transdroid (not to be confused with a voice-modulating app of the same name) that lets you check up on your precious torrents from a distance.
It’ll work with Transmission, µTorrent, plain BitTorrent or Deluge, as long as you have a version that supports a web UI. Go look for it in the preferences, I’ll wait.
Yes? Good? Okay. So now that you’re all excited, I have to tell you that the app is a bit of a letdown. It’s mostly potential at this point. Setup is super easy, if you know some basic stuff like how to get your IP (or proxy, I suppose) and port numbers. It started working right away for me, and that’s when I noticed that there’s no UI to speak of. You can sort by name, but status sorting is useless (you can’t tell it how to sort, really) and everything is in one big list. No “active torrents,” no “seeding,” no nothing. The UI really needs to be fleshed out — and I’m sure it will be in time. But right now it’s hard to recommend to any serious torrent user.
The search function works great, though. A quick search on Mininova (the search box can do BTjunkie, Mininova, or ISOHunt right now) brought up results within seconds, and a quick touch added the torrent to my “downloading” list on my computer almost instantaneously. Slight problem, though. When I stopped and removed that test torrent on my computer, it started downloading again right away. So I removed it again — permanently, you understand, the way you remove giraffe porn. It was not until I removed it on my phone that it died the true death. Trouble, my friends.
So yes, it exists, but I’d give it a couple months to get a real UI and work out the issues. I’m glad it’s there, though.
Source: mobilecrunch.com
