Vuze Releases “Vuze to Go” Mobile BitTorrent Client

If you are an active BitTorrenter (is that even a word?) and are often on the go, perhaps you’re looking for a portable client that you can take with you, on either your thumb drive or an external hard drive. At quick glance, I’m not completely sold on the reason for this, but if you happen to have a torrent half-downloaded, and need to leave the house, yet want the finished torrent with you when it completes, then I could see it. Seems like a niche need, though.

Popular BitTorrent software Vuze (formarly Azureus) has just released what I believe to be the first-ever paid BitTorrent client, called Vuze to Go. The goal is to simply offer you the ability to torrent on the go, and it’s as easy as installing the application to the thumb drive or another USB-based storage device, and running it from there, rather than from your regular Vuze installation.

There is of course a few issues with this. First, it costs money, so its attractiveness is faded from that alone. The reason for the charge is thanks to the technology used, from Ceedo, which essentially allows Vuze to Go to run from inside a virtual environment, which gets around the issue of a PC with no Java installed (which is required by the desktop Vuze). While I personally don’t mind Vuze too much, I still find it a bit bloated (especially this version), but for those Windows users who want a free alternative, nothing sounds better than uTorrent.

In order to get it to work on systems that don’t have Java installed, Vuze to Go contains a virtual operating system in addition to the regular Vuze application. Vuze teamed up with a company called Ceedo who developed the ‘virtualization’ technology. This partnership does come with some downsides though. First of all, the Vuze to Go client costs $9.99, which is quite unusual for a BitTorrent client. Vuze’s Director of Marketing Chris Thun told TorrentFreak that they were required to charge for the new application, and that the price tag was unavoidable.