Welcome to Tap That App, I'm Seth Rosenblatt and this is the show where we show off
some of the hottest mobile apps around. You may think that torrenting and mobile
devices would be more of a greasy oil-and-water combo than tasty PB and J, but torrent
progenitor BitTorrent, Inc. has got something special cooked up for you with the uTorrent
Remote for Android.
And yes, before all you hataz start hating, I KNOW it's pronounced "micro-Torrent", but
what do you type when you search for it? U-Torrent.
Now that's settled, let me tell you about this killer app. It slices, it dices, it... It does none
of those things. As you might imagine from the name, it DOES let you control your
desktop torrents from your Android device. You can add, start, pause, or remove
torrents, including torrents from RSS feeds, and you can check a torrent's upload or
download status. While all those are pretty cool, the big feature that makes this app a
must is that it allows you to transfer, save, and play back any completed file from your
PC to your Android device.
In other words, best to do this on Wi-Fi, because otherwise there goes your data cap.
Now, to use uTorrent Remote, you'll have to upgrade your desktop client to the rough
alpha of uTorrent 3.0. Once installed, go to the Web section of the uTorrent preferences
and choose a username and password, then enter those in to the uTorrent Remote app.
The app comes with buttons for viewing all your torrents, and then filtering by active
downloads, currently seeding, and completed torrents. You can customize labels for
your torrents, and add RSS feeds--an excellent way to stay on top of podcasts, for
example.
Tap a torrent and you're provided with a detailed list of information. Controls at the
bottom will cancel the torrent, pause it, and view its files. Tap the folder icon and get a
list of the files in the torrent. You can select on the fly which ones to copy to your phone.
Once copied over, a process that depends heavily on signal strength and the size of the
file, the icon changes to a playback arrow.
Note that just because you can transfer the file to your phone doesn't mean that your
phone has the ability to play it back, and uTorrent Remote doesn't include a file
conversion tool. Be sure that if you're going to go through the effort of transferring a file
that your Android knows how to handle it. MP3, MP4, and JPEGs, for example, ought to
be fine without any tweaking.
That's it for this week's show! If you've got any suggestions bang em on over to
TapThatApp At CNET dot com. I'm Seth Rosenblatt and we'll see you next week.
