uTorrent 1.6 final released
Funny. I made the switch from Bitcomet to uTorrent two days ago and was using the first release candidate of uTorrent 1.6 and liked it a lot. It's faster and uses less system resources than Bitcomet.
The uTorrent team has released uTorrent 1.6 final today which is available on the project's website.
Just replace the old executable with the new one and you are ready to go. The file is only 170K in size which may be a reason why it's using less system resources than other BitTorrent clients. Take a look at the impressive list of changes if you want to know what changed with this release. (Update no longer available)
Update: A lot has changed since the release of uTorrent 1.6 and while not everything has changed for the better, a lot has. One major change is that BitTorrent Inc. acquired uTorrent recently and that some users of the program disliked that move.
The latest release version at the time of writing, May 2012, is uTorrent Stable 3.1.3 build 27220. One of the biggest change was the release of uTorrent Plus, a commercial version of the application that adds features to it that are not needed for the torrent downloading but add features to the application that extend it in other ways.
Check out What's uTorrent Plus for an overview of what the commercial client offers. You can also read up on the releases in uTorrent 3.1 by following the link.
The five core features that uTorrent Plus adds are the following:
- Antivirus protection built-in.
- Media player that can play audio and video files right in the client.
- Media converter to convert files so that you can move them to popular devices.
- Ad-free.
- Secure remote access to files.
A third issue that came to light only recently is that the company has now started to distribute updates with adware, at least for some users. Before that, updates happened more or less silently in the background. Utorrent users now need to check the update dialog to make sure that they do not install toolbars or other unwanted software on their system.
Update 2: Download the latest version of the client from the official homepage.Things have changed significantly several times since the original release.