uTorrent to Soon Get Eight Cool New Features

μTorrent, also referred to as “micro Torrent”, is currently the most popular BitTorrent client, and for good reason. The main one is the fact that it’s lightweight, at just over 300KB. To put that in perspective, a handful of .torrent files will be much larger than that. The other reason is that it’s full-featured, so overall, there’s little to dislike.

But, the “best” can always be improved, and in the case of μTorrent, there’s a lot of good stuff en route. Earlier this summer, the developers released an official stable version of a Mac version, and soon, the developers have stated that a Linux version will be released as well. I personally can’t wait for it to get here, because over the course of the past few years, I’ve dealt a fair bit with both Transmission and Vuze, and neither are that impressive (to me).

In addition to the Linux version, there are other features soon to be rolled out that should please users all over. One of the more notable is improved prioritization. If you have a torrent that has multiple files within, you’ll have greater control over which ones to download first, and if you have a lot of torrents on the go, then it should be made easier to get the torrent you need the fastest, the fastest.

For those of you constantly on the go, μTorrent will offer an option to e-mail you when a particular torrent is done. And hey, with e-mail apparently on the decline, it’s nice to see yet another reason to fill our inboxes (with something other than spam, at least). To make sure that your torrents never cease up your Internet connection while you’re actually using it, another feature to be implemented is to activate the torrents only if the computer is idle. Handy.

There are other future features mentioned at the article linked to below, but of all, the fact that μTorrent is turning open source might be one of the more exciting. Even more so when you look at the official FAQ where it states, “It is not likely to become open source.“

With increasing bandwidth and users increasing their set up knowledge, BitTorrent downloads are completing faster than ever before. However, with increased speeds comes an increased appetite for higher quality and therefore larger downloads, xvid versus DVD-size videos for example. Inevitably this means that users will be away from their machines when certain downloads complete. With email notifications, completion will be reported immediately.