17 tips for iPhone Battery Survival at a Music Festival

To mark Glastonbury Festival this week and following on from our recent blog on music festival apps let’s talk about how your mobile phone can survive a music festival and maybe even last the weekend.

You are going to a music festival and you want to take your smartphone with you (which is a debate on its own but let's move on). But hang on - your phone's battery normally begins to die on you half way through a morning? How can it survive this?

A big weekend of texting, snapping, videoing, tweeting, posting, 'gramming and maybe even calling (remember that) means you have a bit of a problem. In a field, no charger, 3-5 days….Pyramid, Shangri-la, Healing Fields, The Park or back in your tent - you sometimes need your phone to survive...

Don’t worry, we’ve got your back with some app management, device advice and some behavioural coaching. Lets do this!

1. Turn Your Phone Off

The device has plenty of little programmes and processes that might be a buggy and draining battery. As a nice refresh its wise to turn the phone off once in a while to reset your phones karma. Hold the power button down and slide the power bar. Wait a minute. Power on. Easy.

2. FULLY charge your phone

Before your hedonistic trip of a lifetime let the battery drain right down and then fully charge. Daily part-charging and part-draining is poor battery management and gives you a clunky performance. Like a good night’s sleep a full charge is good for the phone.

3. Email settings

Have you ever changed your email settings and does Push or Fetch mean anything to you? If your email is on Push then your phone is constantly asking if it’s got mail (think 5 year-old within 100 yards of an ice cream van). This drains the battery - especially in remote locations where you can’t get signal. This worries the phone and it tries even harder to connect.

The solution: On your phone go to: SETTINGS > MAIL, CONTACTS, CALENDARS > FETCH NEW DATA > TURN OFF PUSH. 

Change to Fetch Every 15 Minutes. Or longer.

If you do this and want to check for an email the Mail App will check for new messages when you open it up anyway so you can always pull new email on demand.

4. Delete Email Accounts

Not so much software this one but behaviour. If you can, delete email accounts you don’t need while you are away (but can easily retrieve again!). This means less mail servers, less battery use, longer battery life. I had a new iPhone recently and didn’t load an email address onto it for a week and the battery lasted for days.

 "tell them you were in a field with 100,000 other muddy folk and you couldn’t get a signal"

Particularly your work ones. If you reply to an email at the start of your trip then they know you will reply to others. Which of course they will send them. Before you know it you are getting dragged into email debates, wars, problems and you should be there having a good time. Be brave - the world will turn without you - and delete the accounts you don’t need but let your nearest and dearest know what you can be reached on.

If someone has a problem tell them you were in a field with 100,000 other muddy folk and you couldn’t get a signal. (Which is probably true).

5. Delete some apps

Go on. We dare you.

Festival signals are often poor. Of course you want to be Boast-Posting about your weekend, but come Sunday when your phone is dead it’s not going to be such a good idea. Trying to read Twitter, Facebook or Instagram amongst the madness and keeping up with the Likes and Comments means you are 1) Missing out on the stuff going on around you 2) I promise you it’s frustrating getting the signal - your poor phone is working much harder on data strengths of E or the dreaded GPRS.

So, deep breath, take the plunge, delete some of the mega-apps, free yourself from staring at your gadget while headliners headline and jugglers juggle - be mindful and enjoy.

How to delete an app? Touch the app icon and hold for a moment. The apps will then jiggle a merry dance with an X in the top corner. Delete what you want and then press the main home button to stop the jiggling.

 

6. Decide how to communicate

You are likely in a group. Text is OK, possibly more instant (although I have left Glastonbury on the Monday and while in Michaelwood services on the M5 got texts from lost mates from the Thursday night) but will everyone get it? Tip 1. Decide on one Group Messenger app like WhatsApp or similar and then use that. Build a Chat Group and then you are all on the same page and spend less time getting texts, to send another text, and then diving into Facebook to pick up messages from that and draining the battery with fussy use. Tip 2. If you have Facebook and don't have Facebook messenger then get that. Its a great add on.

 

7. Turn brightness down

An obvious one. Turn the brightness of your phone down. Light = battery = well, you get it by now. SETTINGS > Wallpapers & Brightness

 

8. Turn off auto brightness

Another brightness tip. Your phone has a light sensor. Sensors are constantly working. This drains battery. So to turn this off go to SETTINGS > Wallpapers & Brightness and throw that switch to off.

 

9. Speed up auto-lock

SETTINGS>GENERAL>AUTO-LOCK>1 MINUTE

This locks the phone faster so it’s not illuminating your pocket after you last used it for no reason whatsoever. And while you are at it, even better…

 

 

 

 

 

10. Lock your phone when you've used it

A quick press of the power button closes the phone and locks the screen and within seconds your apps stop processing. It’s a good habit to get into.

 

11. Limit Location Services

OK, now this is a big drain on your battery as the phone is telling the network where you are constantly for its own use and for the benefit of the apps (sometimes that’s a good thing says us the App Developer!).

Some apps like iPhone finders depend on this. Other apps don’t. the more that you turn off the better.

PRIVACY > LOCATION SERVICES. You can decide whether you turn it off for certain apps or all of them.

 

 

 

 

 

12. Remove Apple diagnostics

If you care about Apple’s data collection then move on. course you don't....

Otherwise SETTINGS> GENERAL> ABOUT> SCROLL

DOWN> DIAGNOTICS AND USEAGE and turn off.

 

 

 

 

 

 

13. Close your apps

It’s wise to keep on top of open apps. Double click your home button and swipe your apps up (if you are on iOS7) and this closes apps and stops them whirring around in the background and chomping on your battery.

 

14. Choose Which Apps Can Run At All Times

SETTINGS>GENERAL>BACKGROUND APP REFRESH


How cheeky, some apps can work when you don’t want them to. Zap ‘em!

 

 

15. Manage your Notifications

SETTINGS>NOTIFICATIONS CENTER

Scroll down. Keep scrolling and you will see all the apps that have Noticiations set up on your phone. This is a good thing in normal life (said the keen App Developing company) but we are going off the radar for a few days and need to keep our device alive so....

Have a fiddle with your settings. Some apps you will want to remove from the 'Center'. Some keep. 

Here you are turning off Noticiaftions for Twitter on your home screen and settling just for the little red flag on the Twitter icon on your phone.

The more notifications you have the more tiny little nibbles there are buzzing away on your phone's life expectancy over the weekend.

16. Portable Chargers

You knew this was coming. Why not cheat? If you have £20-40 to spend then we’d recommend getting a portable charger and you’ll use it for years to come. Glastonbury are laying on a great service this year for charging units and it’s proved so popular that they have sold out. But we of course recommend heeding some of the good advice above. 

17. Sandwich Bags

What?! Actually nothing to do with your battery but we really recommend those sliding sealing sandwich bags to keep your phone nice and dry in should it get a bit wet. These things are priceless. In fact these things are the ultimate Festival Hack and are great for carrying around your money, camera ..... and also your wet wipes .... and let's leave that there!

If you have any more tips, please leave a comment. Now, where is the Cider bar?

Visit our website on www.pockitworld.com and hit us up on Twitter.

10 Reasons for a Music Festival to have a Mobile App

We think that smartphones and Music Festivals owe a lot to each other.

In less than 10 years mobile has transformed the music industry. CD sales are plummeting and downloads are soaring. Corners of living rooms and walls of bedrooms have been reclaimed again with these tiny devices holding all of your music. The likes of Spotify and YouTube have turned us into streamers rather than owners of music. Boxes of CD’s are joining the boxes of vinyl up in the attic.

The demise of 7” single sales has had further knock-on effects: The Charts have vanished, music has all-but disappeared from mainstream TV and so bands now need to perform live to get by and promote their music. This is expensive and risky to do on your own and this has led in part to the huge rise in the Music Festival industry as bands ‘tour’ festivals.

So you could say that in many ways the music festival and the mobile phone are good mates. The music demographic, the festival demographic and the mobile demographic must be a ridiculously good match.

 

So mobile is booming. Music festivals are booming. But a quick check on the app stores and very few music festivals appear to have a mobile app. Why is that? Here's two thoughts. Apps for this kind of purpose are still a fairly new idea as mobile overtakes the PC and the cost to produce and App has been traditionally in the ten of thousands.

Here Pockit World we think the now is absolutely the right time for festivals to produce their own app, the with our costs to produce an app being much lower than you think its time to close that gap in the market!

So here are 10 reasons why your music festival needs a mobile app.

 

1.      Sell Tickets!

This is the #1 priority of any festival. There is so much fixed cost involved in putting on a festival that unless you are called Michael or Emily then you have probably got some selling to do. A quick browse around some big festival names - Latitude, Reading, Leeds, V, Download, Isle of Wight, T in the Park – and they all have some or all of their ticket availability for sale. So how will a mobile app help?

Stand out from the crowd. The world’s gone mobile. Not everyone is sat at a PC anymore clicking around your lavish website. People are out and about. Anyone interested in your festival will have the chance to download the app and experience some of your buzz before they dive in and book.
Also, loads of people going to your festival will download the app. People going to festivals love to talk about that and share it.

“I’m going to T in The Park!”
“Cool. Who’s on?”
“Let me show you….”

With your app on their phone you will have 100’s and 1000’s of mini sales agents running around showing your line up and sharing your ticket sales page.

2.      Promote Your Acts

We can put on your app YouTube clips, Twitter, Vines and a full music download section for iTunes on Apple or 7 Digital on Android. This means that your people can sample and listen to your bands and you can keep your headliners very happy by having sections of your app featuring them and boosting their music sales.

3.      Festival Buddy

For a lot of people this will be their first time and many others will be out of practise. So you can feature shopping lists, what to take, helpful hints, links to other peoples Blogs to help everyone get the most out of their wild weekend. We can fill your app up with content pages, PDF material, web links and all sorts to make it totally useful for everyone who goes.

4.      Line-ups

How much money is spent on printing and once it is printed what if there is a change? Oops. But this is the big question on site. Who is on? Where? And are they any good? Your app can display the line up in all sorts of ways.

5.      Site Information

As above. Think printing costs and what can be transferred onto digital. Map, Directions, Site information, Stage Maps, Campground information, Lock ups, Mobile charging….. plenty to get out to the masses on here. Oh, and a weather link might be good.

 

6.      Generate Revenue

Of course a festival is not just about the music. There are shops, services, bars, food, merchandise and all sorts of concession stands who have paid good money to be there and would like to join in on the app. Through the app you could advertise availability, discounts, Happy Hours, promote causes, charities, shows, talks, presentations and good things happening over the weekend.

It’s up to you. Use the app as powerful a leverage and attract commercial partners. With our QR code feature you could have deals within the app such as “Go to the AA Tent / Vodafone Orange Mobile / Oxfam tent, scan their QR Code and get Free Ear Plugs / Mobile Charge / Coffee…..”. With all the money that these partners invest in getting to site your app can guarantee them the footfall. How happy would that make them? And how much would it be worth?

Sponsorship. If you are looking to secure a festival sponsor then the app is just the most amazing platform to bundle into the deal.

Finally though, be cool. Don't have rubbish Ads on the app. Your typical festival go-er (well done us for getting this far before calling someone a "festival go-er") will reject that stuff immediately.

7.      Digital Tannoy

Push Notifications are an extremely important part of the functionality. You can send promotional messages, Line-Up changes alerts, remind about site rules and safety, lost children, traffic coming to and going home from the Festival. This gives you an instant news channel – a digital tannoy. You can even send a message to a selected area!

8.      Your brand

An app will make have you seen as a dynamic, forward-thinking and welcoming Festival. We can 100% brand an app as yours. If you are a niche or charitable festival with a purpose this is vitally important.

Also, Unofficial App’s spring up from time to time which takes your brand out of your control. Tackling that legally is costly and unseemly. The fact that they appear suggests that there is a major gap in the market and demand for them.

 

9.      See you next year then? 

Repeat customers are just the best. People who have had a great time will come back and you will create a massive fan base that you can build on. A mobile app will add value to the experience of not just the festival-goer but also the bands, concession community, suppliers and your partners. Adding images, video, and all sorts of Post-Festival coverage and content will help you grow your fans.

10.  Finally, have a bit of fun. 

Have a giggle with it and involve the app into the festival programme. Not only will the app bring all of your social media into one area – Twitter, Facebook, Instagram – you can add interactive features and sharing features in all sorts of ways. How about a Crowd Cam, Chat Wall, Feedback tabs as well as a Best Wellies, Best Tent, Best Fancy Dress competitions. 

For more information Follow Us on Twitter @PockitWorld, email us at theteam@pockitworld.com, visit www.pockitworld.com and we are also on FestivalNet.

We’d love to hear from you!