Vuze, the BitTorrent client formerly known as Azureus, has just been released in a portable version. Unlike the regular Vuze client, Vuze to Go is closed source and costs $9.99. No doubt a pirated version will end up on torrent sites sooner or later.

Over the past few months Vuze has been implementing lots of changes and new features based on feedback from its active community.

In response to a recent survey where 72% of Vuze users indicated they own a portable hard drive, the developers have now rolled out a portable version of their client, so that people can carry it around on a flash drive or external hard disk.

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.

“We’ve invested in creating a portable solution that has an entirely different ease-of-use relative to any other solution in the market. We believe that if we’re solving a real problem in an elegant way, our users will be willing to pay for it,” he said.

Although TorrentFreak was assured that the core Vuze application will always remain free, one of the downsides of teaming up with Ceedo is that the portable version of Vuze is not open source like the main client. “The Vuze application bundled into Vuze To Go is still open source. However, the Ceedo virtualization package is not open source,” Thun explained to TorrentFreak.

A free trial of Vuze to Go is available for those who want to try it out. It’s pretty much identical to the regular client and it ran pretty smoothly in our tests. uTorrent users who want to go portable don’t need a separate application.