“iTorrent”: A BitTorrent Client for your iPhone?
Written by Ben Jones on July 13, 2007The possibility of file sharing whilst walking down the street is closer than you might think. Carrying a BitTorrent client in your pocket is getting closer, with the release of new high-powered communication tools, such as the much publicized Apple iPhone.
It would almost seem as if TorrentFreak is the only technologically based news site to have not carried some sort of piece about the iPhone, in one form or another. In order to correct this deficit, we wondered ‘would it be possible to torrent on one? After all, what can be more iconic than using something (potentially) dubbed iTorrent?
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.
According to one of the developers of the ‘iPhone-binutil‘ project, going by the name ‘geohot’, the only obstacle stopping it from making an application like “iTorrent” happening is their current lack of coding ability for the iPhone. The file system is open, and media players already exist, if for nothing else than playing media from iTunes.
On of the downsides it that, for many, the 3.4Gb free on a brand new phone (or 7.4Gb, if you went for the bigger one) may not be enough to hold much data, but it all depends on what you torrent. Bigger problems are that the battery will last only in the region of 6-8 hours at best (according to Apple’s figures) which isn’t the greatest. Additionally, many users have reported the wifi connections being on the slow side as far as data transfers go. Using EDGE is a lot slower, about 30k/sec max.
Of course, the benefits are that you can carry it around with you, and you have the wide range of content available, with the benefits of torrent file’s typical pricing (free). Of course, time will tell. Meanwhile, the lack of MMS on the iPhone has been a small thorn in the side of many owners. However, there is help at hand in the form of a workaround. More details here
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34 Responses
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So you can connect to a WiFi network in a city cafe somewhere, and torrent the latest aXXo rip?
Im not sure how public WiFi works,
but would you have Anonymity?
No hardline IP to track you…
If you have a routable IP, you have no “anonymity” and you are always trackable.
I think skins means identifyable, when he says trackable
Eeeeh… the iPhone changes nothing, it has been possible to do this for a long time with many phones, at least in Europe, but I can’t see any real use for it since we got fast computers with big hard drives and fast internet connections.
The other thing standing in the way is the AT&T’s ‘fine print’. Take a look at section 13 of http://www.newnetworks.com/attwirelessfineprint.htm to be more specific. At best you can only hope for using a WebUI for something like uTorrent, but obviously this won’t let you download directly to your phone. There are a lot more issues shown in that above line, like the limits they try to place on WiFi usage.
This certainly not a first. The Iphone is just another blackberry (refering to hype). This technology has been around for quite sometime. Whether it be a PDA or PDA/Cell phone. I bought my first palm Pilot back in 1997. The got better every year until 2003. That is pretty much when WiFi and Blue Tooth became standard. I have an Axim X30 and it is not much different from said iphone technology wise. (no cell phone). It gets torrents while I walk around campus. Wake me up when something original actually happens.
Sybian Based phones like the NOKIA N95 have been able to do bittorent for a while now .
http://www.symbian-freak.com/news/006/10/sym_torrent.htm
This seems like a very good way of seeding torrents for extended periods of time(on WiFi of course)
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http://www.FreeOpenMoko.com
I guess nobody here has heard of Winmobile Torrent then?
“The possibility of file sharing whilst walking down the street” is not actually just a possibility, it’s already available if you have something that runs Windows Mobile (i.e. many smartphones and PDAs) :)
I love how they have the Microsoft OS shown on the screen of the iPhone.
The iPhone changes nothing. Unlike other smartphones that could run the protocol already, the iPhone has no development tools, no published library, no means of application distribution, and no visible filesystem. Furthermore, the author can’t possibly know what the iPhone CPU is since it’s not published on the spec page that he linked to (or anywhere else) so he can’t possibly defend the claim that the iPhone “has more than enough cpu power for it” and there hasn’t even been a mention for why someone would want to run such a client on a phone that may transition from EDGE to WiFi regularly. If bittorrent were useful on phones we’d see it already.
I guess the author of this worthless blog just had to write something about the iPhone regardless of how ignorant it is.
Why don’t we have mobile device host services, not unlike how our PCs work with web based email?
Let’s say you have a set of applications on your PC that are designed to take special commands from your iPhone and understand them as commands and send information back to your iPhone.
Your PC has a far higher processing capacity, networking capacity and now that there’s a real web phone, you can take advantage of this in ways which previously were unimaginable.
You could walk around the problem of the 8GB barrier by having an upload/download between you and your PC with a special webserver, having only the files you needed on it.
Let’s say… You’re browsing the web. And you find a .TORRENT you particularly like. Now. Your iPhone doesn’t have the bandwidth capacity to handle REAL torrents but it could manage something like a Rapidshare file download quite happily since it’s one solid connection, not 50+ connections.
Why not have your iPhone send the .torrent to your home server, your home server recognize and begin to the torrent exactly where you tell it to, just like opening a .torrent locally?
Then when you visit the webserver of your machine under the torrent area, it tells you everything about the torrent you ask it (status, seeders, leechers, all that other goodness) and so forth.
When the torrent is complete, you can tell the client to either send the file right to you or if it’s big, automatically convert it into an iPhone friendly format from Div-X or AVI or whatever your iPhone doesn’t like at the size you’ve requested with an estimated sync time and send you it over the internet at high speed.
This would make a great bit of software and frankly, I can’t code for ass but I’d love to see something like this.
It could extend beyond the torrent, passing and converting files between your home server or a web-service server for you and do everything on the webserver that your iPhone isn’t currently capable of.
Sort of a Home away from Home.
And if you have internet access, it Just Works ™.
Oh, and one more thing.
Wouldn’t internet access over the phone with that kind of high-speed demand funk up all the cell networks?
It takes next to nothing to break the cell networks: They’re not as ridged or anywhere NEAR as strong as the Internet is and it’s why we need a revolution on the cell-provider end of things, doing things with generous capacity rather than “just enough to work” like DOS was before the first Macintosh came out.
Retarded.
The future isn’t EVERYTHING on your mobile, its remoting into home base.
Ideally you’ll have your computer doing all your torrenting for you, with a remote interface that allows you to add/edit/delete torrents. And we already have that.
Hell, I wrote an iPhone interface for the usenet application I wrote for broadcatching, and I did it in a couple hours.
WTF bit torrent for WM and symbian devices has been out for MORE than 2 years. streaming content from your home computer to your 3G phone has also been out for years.
wake the frack up people get with the times. the iphone was out of date before it was released. who the hell is going to use BT on dialup edge speeds? that rediculous.
what are you going to download anyways? the iphone doesnt have any kind of file browser or multiple audio/video support. the iphone is next to useless right now unless apple releases an update to give the phone CURRENT functionality, let alone future functionality
Instead of torrenting on the iPhone, why not make a proxy server that connects to your home computer instead?
Imagine, when you walk into your local coffee shop, your iPhone connects to wifi, launches a proxy server, and sends the new server info to your computer at home. Then your computer can continue torrenting over a semi annonymous connection through your iPhone.
This would make an iPhone practical in the process of torrenting.
Has PeerGuardian been ported to the iPhone?
These posts are redundant. Bittorrent mobile has been around for awhile. It is useless because people get tired of looking at the tiny screen. And apple should be boycotted for not supporting open source. Even Microsoft supports it. Its about being free! (I wrote this on my Axim X30)
I think the only way this will happen is as a web UI:
http://www.p2p-blog.com/item-329.html
how will you open ports? of course you can download torrents without doing this but they will surely take much longer… and also, it would probably be risky doing this on the Cingular EDGE network, you can probably get caught much easier if they see you are using a ton of bandwith like that…
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