A Windows Phone 7 smartphone is more than a slick communication device, it can transform into the the perfect festival tool with the right apps nestling in its memory. We’ve toured the virtual aisles of the Windows Phone Marketplace and kicked the tires of tonnes of apps that can power-up your festival going. Read on for our pick of the very best Windows Phone 7 apps this summer…
Price: £free
Shazam is the secret weapon of any smartphone-toting festival-goer. Have it installed on your phone and you’ll be able to identify almost any song you hear, just by holding your phone up to capture the sound. That’s incredibly handy if you find yourself digging a band but haven’t got a festival programme to hand. As long as the live rendition is close to the sound of the recorded version, Shazam will be able to identify it.
Right now, Shazam is offering an unlimited number of song identifications through the Windows Phone 7 app, so you’ll be able to identify as many tracks as you like while you wander between festival stages. If you discover a song you really like, you can buy it immediately through the app too.
Price: £free
Twitter can be a brilliant way of finding out what’s happening at a festival. You’ll get tons of gossip, and instantly know if a line-up changes. Want to know where a secret show is happening, or which food stall is best? Hop onto Twitter and ask fellow festival-goers.
Seesmic is a great Twitter app for Windows Phone 7 with support for lists, so you can create one dedicated just to fellow festival attendees and bands that are playing. It’ll also hook up your Facebook account too, so you can use one app to stay in touch with all your festival friends!
Price: £free trial for 30 days
UK festivals bring music fans from across the world to Britain and there are tons of festivals in Europe that might lure you further afield for your musical fix. With that in mind, grabbing a good translation app for your Windows Phone 7 handset is a great idea. It’ll help you communicate with new friends more easily, wherever they hail from.
Polyglot is a great option. It gives you the ability to translate between 30 different languages and play back translations repeatedly, so you can get the pronunciation just right. You can also share translations by text or email, and access past translations even when you’ve got your data connection switched off.
Price: £free
Having a spare torch when you’re at a festival is always a good move. You never know when the batteries might go on your main light source, or when you might forget to grab it from the tent in the morning. A good torch app on your phone is a good back up plan, since you’ll always have your phone with you, right? Big touch screens can pump out a lot of light when they need to, so Flash 7 makes them pull double duty as a flashlight.
Don’t be mislead though. This Windows Phone 7 app isn’t a simple lightbulb in disguise. As well as giving you the ability to pump up the brightness on your device and keep it up, even when the lock screen is activated, it includes a wide range of colour options, an SOS mode and strobe function if you fancy indulging in a bit of late night raving.
Price: £free for 30 days
Having a Windows Phone 7 device in your pocket means you’ve always got a good camera to hand. But thanks to the range of apps out there, you can super charge those snaps even further. Out in the fields of a festival, a good photo editor app is a very handy thing to have.
Thumba Photo Editor integrates with the Windows Phone 7 Pictures hub and includes 50 different photo editing tools and effects. As well as core tools like resizing, cropping, rotating and flipping photos, you can add a variety of effects like HDR, soft portrait, tilt-shift and pencil sketch. You can also see where you took all your snaps on a map, and add location data if you didn’t geotag the photo to start with.
Price: £0.99
Another handy Windows Phone 7 app for giving your festival photos a tweak, and sharing them with your friends, is Apict. Described as an “instant camera app”, it lets you apply a great instant camera effect and save your edits in high resolution.
What makes Apict brilliant for festival photos is that it adds a border to each photo and allows you to put a description in a handwritten pencil style beneath the image. Do that with your festival snaps as you go along and you’ll have a nice annotated record of your adventures.
Price: £free
It’s called Car Locator but this app is useful for a whole lot more. The app lets you tag a location and then navigate your way back to it using either the animated radar or, more usefully, a Bing Maps view. You can also describe a location and append a photo to it to help you find your way.
Having an app that lets you tag your location means you’ll be able to hunt through the vast village of tents to find your own and best of all, get back to your car at the end of the weekend when tired legs will mean you’d rather not be wandering around lost.
Tell us what you think of our Windows Phone 7 festival apps selection in the comments. What apps would you add to the list to help a Windows Phone 7 packing festival fan?
Photo by whosdadog
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