A smartphone is a festival essential. It’ll keep you up to speed with who's playing on which stage, locate your tent in the dark, and even identify that amazing tune you just can't place.
Of course, it’ll also pull double duty as a digital camera and MP3 player, for those brief moments of downtime. However your Android phone comes to the rescue this festival season, our Android festival apps recommendations have got your covered…
Glastonbury Scheduler
Price: £0.89
Sure it's an app with a very specific use, but Glastonbury is Britain's most famous festival and if you were lucky enough to snag a ticket, your next challenge is to choose which bands to watch. With multiple stages to choose from and a bill stuffed with amazing acts, you'll need to make some tough decisions.
The Glastonbury Scheduler app will create a custom schedule for each day of the festival, including stage times. There’s also a handy Next Act widget which you can pin to your home screen to make sure you’re always dashing off in the right direction.
Weather Bug
Price: £free
British festivals have unpredictable weather. That’s part of their…well…not charm, but it’s definitely part of the UK festival experience. That’s where Weather Bug comes in, giving you access to current weather forecasts, weather alerts and even animated radar images so you’ll see the next downpour coming.
The best thing about Weather Bug is that it offers a 7-day detailed forecast which will come in very handy when you’re packing for a festival or sitting in your tent on a sunny morning, wondering if that blue sky will hold out through a day of watching bands.
Shazam
£free
While you’ll probably know a lot of the songs you hear at festivals, there’s always a few that are totally new to you. If you come across a tune you want to identify, Shazam is the ideal secret weapon. Fire it up while the band is playing and, if they’re playing it anywhere near close to the recorded version, Shazam will identify it.
Usually Shazam only gives you a limited number of identifications a month but right now it’s offering free tagging until January 2012. That means the app is good to go for the whole of the summer festival season.
Google Translate
Price: £free
Britain’s music festivals attract visitors from across the globe, with Glastonbury and Reading/Leeds particularly popular meccas for music fans from across Europe. If you meet new people and find the language barrier getting in the way, Google Translate will come in handy.
The app can translate between 50 languages including all the major European ones, and it’ll turn text into speech for most of them, so you don’t need to struggle with pronunciation. You can even speak phrases directly into the app to get a quick translation.
Beluga
Price: £free
Beluga is a clever way of sharing messages with a group of mates quickly. It’s a little like Blackberry Messenger, but runs on Android and iPhone. The app lets you define private groups, called pods, and share instant messages, your location and photos with push notifications to let your friends know when you want to get in touch. That’s much easier than calling them up and shouting over a booming PA system.
If you’re at a festival with a bunch of mates, Beluga is a brilliant addition to your smartphone toolkit because it bundles pictures, text and location together in one handy package. Seen something amazing? Let everyone in the pod know what it is, show them a photo and even tag its location, all at once!
FxCamera
Price: £free
There’re always unusual sights to see at festivals, above and beyond the traditional man in a jester hat and dubious-looking hamburger. To give your festival snaps a twist install FxCamera. It adds great effects to your photos, including the familiar-sounding Polandroid, an Andy Warhol filter and an excellent Fisheye lens effect.
Words With Friends
Price: £free
No matter how packed your festival schedule is, you’ll spend some time away from the mosh pit. Whether you’re queueing for the showers or waiting for the big act to set up their gear your Android phone can fill that downtime with top notch games.
Be careful though, and dodge graphically intense games which could put a dent in your phone’s battery. Instead choose Words With Friends. It’s a great source of distraction, and lets you play against mates for an extra challenge.
Pro Zoom Camera 5x
Price: £1.81
While FxCamera will make your casual shots look cool, Pro Zoom Camera 5x is a great camera app to have in your arsenal if you’re taking snaps of a distant stage. It powers up your Android phone’s standard skills, adding 5x zoom, 5 different white balance settings, 8 filters, enhanced brightness, contrast and flash controls.
You can automatically geotag your photos too, letting you easily group them together by location later on. That’ll let you tell which snaps of your friends in the crowd were taken at which stage, with which band playing, and at what time.
Andropan Autostitcher
Price: £2.24
The third in our trio of festival-friendly Android photo apps, Andropan has a unique ability to grab a series of photos and stitch them together automatically to create a panorama. Stand on the top of a hill and look out over a vast tented village and the bright lights of the stages and tell us you don’t want to take a panorama.
Twicca
Price: £free
No event these days is complete without a Twitter hashtag, and a healthy amount of tweeting to go with it. If you want to find out just who the mystery act at your festival is, or where you should head for the best grub, hopping on to Twitter could come in very handy.
Twicca is a great, lightweight Twitter app that won’t hammer your battery but includes handy features like the ability to save recent hashtags (#glastonbury or #latitude, perhaps), photo and video uploading to yFrog, so you can share your snaps with the masses, and a home screen widget to quickly see the most recent tweets in your timeline.
Let us know what you make of our selection of Android festival apps in the comments and share others you’d recommend…
Picture by algreen
Liked this? Try these
Smartphone apps to get yourself organised
Travel apps: smartphone apps to supercharge your summer holiday
Tried our My O2 app yet?
press enquiries
press enquiries