Running Bittorrent on your iPhone
07/16 2007 | 01:44 PM
Posted by: Janko Roettgers
Torrentfreak recently featured a piece about the possibility to run Bittorrent on your iPhone. From the article:
"The technical specifications of the device certainly make it possible. It has more than enough cpu power for it, assuming a nice, tightly coded client was written. The built in WiFi (802.11b/g) and use of the EDGE 2.75G wireless network data transfer system allows a fairly widespread availability of reception."
Hold on, not so fast. Sure, the hardware may be suitable for Bittorrent, but Apple's locked down iPhone OS makes it hard to imagine that anything like this will be available in the near future.
The iPhone doesn't allow the installation of any third party applications. In fact it doesn't even allow any plain old http downloads, meaning that you can't download MP3s, or Torrent files, for that matter. Bittorrent friends might be out of luck even if hackers were able to bypass both of these restrictions: Apple could always lock down the device with the next system update.
Still, there is a trick to use your iPhone for Bittorrent downloads. More and more Bittorrent clients offer their users web interfaces to control their downloads from a second computer. Just install µTorrent or Azureus on your home PC, access it through a web browser from your office machine and you're able to start and stop Torrent downloads remotely. There is no reason that this wouldn't work with an iPhone. There are some obstacles though:
µTorrent has been a favourite with the Windows PC crowd for years now. The client is very lean and ressource-friendly, and it features a beautiful web UI that resembles the application's original interface. However, this web UI doesn't work with Safari - and since the iPhone uses Safari / Webkit as it's browser, µTorrent users are out of luck.
Azureus can be extended through various plug-ins, some of which offer remote control capabilities through a web interface. More advanced users tend to like the Swing Web Interface, since it emulates the look and feel of the original Azureus interface. Unfortunately this won't work for the iPhone either. The Swing plug-in makes heavy use of Java, and the iPhone doesn't support Java yet.
iPhone users might want to give the Azureus HTML Web UI plug-in a try instead. It's very ressource-friendly, uses only a little bit of Javascript and runs under Safari. I don't actually own an iPhone, but I tested this WebUI with the >iPhoney simulator and it seemed to run just fine. The only downside: The search function doesn't seem to work, so users still have to find Torrents through third-party websites.
Advanced users can even skin it through CSS. I wonde how long it will take until someone makes a dedicated iPhone skin that is optimized for the phone's screen resolution?
"The technical specifications of the device certainly make it possible. It has more than enough cpu power for it, assuming a nice, tightly coded client was written. The built in WiFi (802.11b/g) and use of the EDGE 2.75G wireless network data transfer system allows a fairly widespread availability of reception."
Hold on, not so fast. Sure, the hardware may be suitable for Bittorrent, but Apple's locked down iPhone OS makes it hard to imagine that anything like this will be available in the near future.
The iPhone doesn't allow the installation of any third party applications. In fact it doesn't even allow any plain old http downloads, meaning that you can't download MP3s, or Torrent files, for that matter. Bittorrent friends might be out of luck even if hackers were able to bypass both of these restrictions: Apple could always lock down the device with the next system update.
Still, there is a trick to use your iPhone for Bittorrent downloads. More and more Bittorrent clients offer their users web interfaces to control their downloads from a second computer. Just install µTorrent or Azureus on your home PC, access it through a web browser from your office machine and you're able to start and stop Torrent downloads remotely. There is no reason that this wouldn't work with an iPhone. There are some obstacles though:
µTorrent has been a favourite with the Windows PC crowd for years now. The client is very lean and ressource-friendly, and it features a beautiful web UI that resembles the application's original interface. However, this web UI doesn't work with Safari - and since the iPhone uses Safari / Webkit as it's browser, µTorrent users are out of luck.
Azureus can be extended through various plug-ins, some of which offer remote control capabilities through a web interface. More advanced users tend to like the Swing Web Interface, since it emulates the look and feel of the original Azureus interface. Unfortunately this won't work for the iPhone either. The Swing plug-in makes heavy use of Java, and the iPhone doesn't support Java yet.
iPhone users might want to give the Azureus HTML Web UI plug-in a try instead. It's very ressource-friendly, uses only a little bit of Javascript and runs under Safari. I don't actually own an iPhone, but I tested this WebUI with the >iPhoney simulator and it seemed to run just fine. The only downside: The search function doesn't seem to work, so users still have to find Torrents through third-party websites.
Advanced users can even skin it through CSS. I wonde how long it will take until someone makes a dedicated iPhone skin that is optimized for the phone's screen resolution?
