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The massive summer music festivals are a great way to catch short sets from your four favorite bands while tolerating 25 mediocre acts you've never heard of. But like anything that involves leaving the house for an extended period of time, you need to be prepared. And when we say prepared, we mean it's time to get your smartphone ready for the crowded, lonely grasslands.
Tickets
How many times have you left the house only to realize 30 minutes later that your tickets are sitting on the counter? Fortunately, many of the fine companies that are happy to charge you five convenience fees for the opportunity to take your money when you buy an overpriced festival ticket. For the iPhone-owning crowd, get into Passbook and trick it out with ticket providers (gougers?) like LiveNation, Ticketmaster, and ThrillCall. Apple's app will keep your tickets in the same place you store your Walgreens club card without the worry of leaving behind a printed ticket. Because you would never leave the house without your smartphone.
For Android fans, you can access your Ticketmaster and Live Nation tickets from within the respective apps.
For all the stone-aged venues that don't work with Passbook apps or don't offer digital tickets to Ticketmaster and Live Nation, but still use barcode readers for admittance, you can drop a PDF of your ticket into Google Drive or Dropbox and pull it up on-screen when you get to the gate. This works at baseball games, too. If you get denied at the entry by some uninformed volunteer worker who doesn't want to scan your phone, just try a different gate.
Passbook comes standard on iOS devices, and Google Drive, Live Nation, Ticketmaster, and ThrillCall are all available for free from the App Store and Google Play.
Directions
Whoever said "getting there is half the fun" has never sat in the horrible music fest traffic. Once you have your tickets, use Google Maps to figure out where you're going and what you might want to do. In addition to the standard point-A-point-B directions, it also has transit directions with times of the next running buses and trains -- great when you decide to ditch the car 30 blocks from the venue to skirt the $40 parking charge. You can use the "Explore" feature to find nearby restaurants, bars, shopping, and a hotel in case you overdo it. The best map app in the business will get you to your venue, and it'll save you time and effort when you want a break from the craziness of the festival grounds, but don't want to stray too far away from the action. You can also save your map for easy access later on: Locate the area of the festival on the screen and type "OK maps" into the search field.
Download Google Maps from the App Store or Google Play.
Photo & Video
At the peak of the action, you have to record everything and anything you see and share it with your friends. Get creative capturing the action with Vine and Camera+. Make sure you split up your six seconds of precious Vine time to record some of the live performance, the crowd going crazy, your friends being ridiculous, and of course, your reaction to it all. Camera+ will help you take the best live-action photos while buried in the crowd. With its various shooting modes, like "Stabilizer" for the sharper images, and "Burst" for a series of rapid-fire shots, it's great for concerts. Just don't be that person that tries to take photos of the acts with the flash turned on.
Get Vine from the App Store or Google Play, and Camera+ from the App Store.
Messaging
When you're busy Vining and shooting tons of photos of bands and people falling down in the beer garden, there's a good chance you'll get separated from your crew. GroupMe makes it a little easier to keep track of your friends' whereabouts. Think of the messaging app as a digital pow-wow for your group. You can organize meetups, coordinate schedules, and tell everyone which taco truck is superior. One of the best things about GroupMe is that it works on nearly every mobile phone platform -- if there isn't a native app, you can use SMS. Also, by forwarding your chats to SMS, you're less likely to lose contact with one another because the local wireless infrastructure is being pummeled with Vine uploads. When 4G and 3G data connections fail, SMS is like a warm blanket, pushing text messages through like a champ.
Download GroupMe from the App Store or Google Play.
Finding Friends
If you get lost so badly your friends can't find you (and you still have network coverage), use Glympse to send your exact location to one or all of your friends. Glympse pinpoints your corpus on a map and generates a link that can be view in a browser, so any smartphone can see it. Choose who you want to send your location to and how long before it will expire. Links can last anywhere between a few minutes and four hours. Your "Hey, I'm over here!" link can be sent via the Glympse app, SMS, Facebook, or Twitter. The link will give them your location and direct them from their location to you.
Get Glympse from the App Store or Google Play.
Network Connection
Don't be surprised when you launch Facebook during a setbreak and nothing happens. You and 20,000 of your closest friends are destroying the nearby cell towers with your calls, texts, tweets, uploads, and barf-filled Snapchats. With all the 4G slamming the network, why not switch to a more archaic and less-used network, like 3G, EDGE or (shudder) GPRS. Typically you can activate it in the Settings menu of your phone under Wireless/Network settings. However, you might need a VPN code or other information from your provider to activate the phone's lesser capabilities, so test this one before heading to the show.
Power!
All this uploading, GPSing, camera-snapping, data transferring, and network seeking will kill your phone in about four hours. Technology is a hungry beast, and you need to feed it. If you plan on actually using your phone after the third band, invest in a charging case or a portable battery pack. Mophie has a line of fancy portable batteries and iPhone cases. MyCharge is another brand we tested recently whose cases we liked. Also check out the less-expensive offerings from Monoprice. Finally, there are some battery packs that plug into your phone like a USB dongle -- we particularly like this $100 pack from Belkin. It can charge two phones at once, and it has a 4,000 mAh cell that's good for four full charges. Sure, there are mobile charging stations at these events now, but why wait in line with the hoi polloi when you can sail your own ship like an Admiral?
If you have some magical tips you want to share with your fellow humans, drop them in the comments. Then we can all point at laugh at the rest of the festival-goers as they wander aimlessly with their dead phones. Or you could help them. That would be better.
