Your BlackBerry is the ultimate festival tool. With a clutch of apps to make your gig photos looks fantastic, help you keep in contact with your friends, identify almost any song and talk to festival goers from around the world. Here's the 10 apps that will get you BlackBerry ready to rock.
Nogago Outdoor
Price: £free
Most GPS apps are designed with motorists in mind and walkers as very much a secondary concern. Nogago Outdoor is an app specifically put together for pedestrians which makes it a great choice for festival fans. You can download maps from the Nogago website and store them on your device, so it’ll even work while your BlackBerry is in offline mode to conserve battery power.
Whether you're headed to the wilds of Somerset for Glastonbury, off to Suffolk for Latitude or anywhere else in the UK for that matter, Nogago Outdoor will be really handy. It can track time, distance and speed, so you’ll know exactly how long it takes to cross the festival campsite, and its maps are optimised for walking, so you needn’t worry about a lack of roads or landmarks.
TuneIn Radio
Price: £free
Festivals are a fantastic escape from the daily grind, but a long weekend away from the rest of the world can mean you end up a little disconnected – that's why odd rumours rush round festival sites every summer. TuneIn Radio is a great way of keeping track of the news and to catch radio coverage of the festival to get all the gossip.
TuneIn Radio gives you to access to over 40,000 radio stations from across the world including all the BBC radio stations and the largest UK commercial stations. That means you can catch up on music news, as well as global goings-on.
Shazam Encore
Price: £4.99
Whichever festival you head to, you’ll see lots of new bands, but keeping track of that really catchy song they played can become quite tricky. Unless you have Shazam Encore as one of your BlackBerry apps, that is. With Shazam on your size, you can identify songs by holding your phone aloft and letting it listen to the music.
As well as being able to identify as many tracks as you want (free versions of the app impose a limit), Shazam Encore gives you the ability to share your musical discoveries via text, email, Twitter and Facebook and buy songs from within the app. It also stores a list of songs you’ve identified, so you can review them when you’re back home.
PixTrix
Price: £free
Festivals offer up plenty of photo opportunities, but you’ll want a top notch photography app to make the most of them. PixTrix is an app that makes it really easy to share the festival photos you've taken on your BlackBerry with your friends, and to give them an extra edge with a range of filters.
As well as putting a retro sheen on your photos, you can hook PixTrix up to your Facebook profile to directly upload them. They're also saved back to the photo album on your phone, which means you can keep both the original pictures and the snaps you've added filters to.
Photo Editor Ultimate Free
Price: £free
OK, so you’ve snapped a brilliant photo but it needs a little tweak. Photo Editor Ultimate Free makes it simple to make those changes right on your BlackBerry, with a wide selection of editing tools to choose from.
Photo Editor Ultimate Free lets you rotate and crop images, combine images, apply colour effects and simply adjust the brightness and contrast. It also has a handy feature that makes it simple to upload your snaps to the web.
UberSocial
Price: £free
These days, if you’re not on Twitter you’re not getting the latest gossip. But to save wading through tons of tweets you should track down the event’s hashtag. Pin down the hashtag for the festival you’re attending and you’ll quickly be able to filter tweets being fired off around you. To do it efficiently, you’ll need a good BlackBerry Twitter app, such as UberSocial.
It's a featured filled BlackBerry app that gives you the ability to create and manage lists. You can put one together featuring only your friends, other people who are at the festival and bands that are playing. It also make it easy to attach pictures to your tweets and view tweets by location to find other festival tweeters around you. Get UberSocial and your BlackBerry will be a hub of campsite gossip!
WhatsApp Messenger
Price: £free
When you head to a festival with a group of friends it’s inevitable you’ll become separated. Having a good instant messaging app with group chat skills means you can find out where everyone is quickly, and spread the word about what you're doing next.
WhatsApp is a cross-platform app which works on BlackBerry, Android and iPhone so it doesn't matter what sort of device your friends are packing. It supports group chat and allows you to fling photos, videos, voice notes, along with your location, to friends. The last one is particularly useful at festivals where arranging a meeting point for a group of people can get a little confusing.
Sentinal XLator
Price: £free
Whether you're at a UK festival or headed to one further afield, you're pretty likely to bump in to foreign festivalgoers. If you need a helping hand with translation, your BlackBerry can help. Sentinal XLator is a translation app powered by Google Translate which does the job admirably.
Sentinal XLator can translate between 52 different languages and can speak the translations to you. If you're worried about mispronouncing words, this BlackBerry app also shows you the phonetic translations for words, and it’ll translate websites, which is handy if you travel to a foreign festival and need to decode a local running order.
Weather Bug
Price: £free
British festivals are brilliant, but are usually at the mercy of the British weather. To find out if you should be pulling your wellies and poncho on, or unpacking your shorts before you leave the tent in the morning, install a BlackBerry app to scope out the weather.
Weather Bug is a great choice, and gives you seven day and hourly forecasts which should be enough for even the most ardent Glastonbury weather watcher. You can also check the weather for other festivals by touching the area on a map, or searching for its location in the app. You can share weather information too, alerting friends via text and email.
Hex Words
Price: £free
Even with lots of festival fun to be had, you're bound to have some downtime. When you're waiting to hit the showers or chilling out before the headliner hits the stage, your BlackBerry can offer some top notch time-killing distractions.
Avoid graphically intense games if you want to make the most of your phone's battery life, and instead choose Hex Words: a fiendishly tricky word game that's addictive but won't eat up battery life.
Let us know what you think of our batch of BlackBerry festival apps in the comments. Which apps would you recommend to someone chucking their BlackBerry in their backpack?
Liked this? Try these
iPhone festival apps: 10 essentials to accompany festival life
Android festival apps: 10 downloads to supercharge your summer
Tried our My O2 app yet?
press enquiries
press enquiries