Transdroid: manage your torrents on the go, with your Android smartphone

As you all know, I recently got an Android phone. I also happen to 'partake in the torrent' from time to time. Not that I'm a pirate or anything, but torrents are often the best solution to a given problem! In fact, I love BitTorrent so much that I actually rent a server with 100Mbit connectivity so that I can download stuff very quickly. The problem is... sometimes I forget to stop a completed torrent.

Yes, if you leave a 100Mbit connection unchecked over a 24 hour period you can accidentally transfer almost a terabyte of data. I've done this multiple times -- one time, I racked up almost 3TB on a frakkin' U2 album, of all things. My ISP always sends me an angry letter threatening to disconnect me. If only there was a solution!

Well, as it turns out there is! All you need is an Android phone, and a rather accomplished app called Transdroid. It's free and open source, and before I installed it I'd never seen the point of smartphones. Now I see why everyone loves their damn pocket-stretching brick-like smartphones.

First up, Transdroid supports almost every BitTorrent client out there. Windows (uTorrent, Vuze), Mac (Transmission) and Linux (rTorrent) -- everything's covered. In this review I use rTorrent and Linux, so your experience might be slightly different!

Second, Transdroid does just about anything you'd ever want in a BitTorrent remote control. I am actually struggling to find a flaw, a niggle, something that I want to improve... but I can't. Oh, well, there is one: there's an overflow problem with large numbers (check the first screenshot). I guess they need to move to 64-bit integers. That's hardly a problem though.

So, instead of focusing on what Transdroid can't do (it would be a very short list), let me just show you want it can do.

Note: to use Transdroid you'll need fairly advanced knowledge of your BitTorrent client, and how to forward ports on your router. Check the guide on setting up uTorrent -- it's not that complex, but Transdroid certainly isn't for noobs that just want to download the latest episode of Glee.

Complete control -- really, you can do anything to your torrents with Transdroid. Set upload and download speeds, stop, delete, pause, add, remove -- you get the idea. You can also filter your torrents to make better use of your small Android screen: downloading, uploading and inactive -- it's your choice.

Search for torrents -- you can also search for torrents on sites like IsoHunt and Mininova, and then start downloading them! Remotely! Perfect for when you're commuting to or from work -- now when you see a newspaper ad or billboard for a new TV series or film... queue it up!

RSS feeds -- you can even import RSS feeds (though I don't know why you would do it on your phone as opposed to the computer doing the torrenting). There's also the option to create your own personally-tailored TV show RSS feed from the fantastic ezRSS service

I think that about covers it. It has some other esoteric features, like an alarm service that can notify you of torrent status changes, and the ability to hook up to Xirvik Torrent boxes. But really, who cares -- Transdroid is fantastic. Use it!

Tags: android, app, bittorrent, download, libtorrent, p2p, remote, rpc, rss, rtorrent, torrent, transdroid, transmission, vuze, xmlrpc