How to save your battery at a festival, and other useful tips

It’s festival season, time to stock up on all your essentials. Time to get your phone festival-ready.

This is our essential guide to using your phone at a festival, the right way. No dead batteries, no maxed out photo galleries and no losing your friends.

Let’s get down to it.

Top festival tips for you and your mobile

1. Conserving your phone’s battery

Turning down the brightness and using battery-saver mode are just a couple of ways you can keep your phone alive from dawn to dusk.

Here’s a few other nifty tricks:

• Switch off keyboard sounds and vibrations
• Restrict apps from working in the background
• Use airplane mode (when you don’t need to be connected)

2. Portable phone chargers

Let’s face it. No matter how good your phone’s battery life, pulling an all-nighter at the party tent is more than likely to leave it drained. That’s where a battery pack comes in.

Portable phone chargers are lightweight, affordable and an absolute life-saver at a festival. Just be careful not to loan it out to too many friends.

3. Clearing space for photos and videos

There’s nothing worse than getting halfway through recording the headliner, only to have your phone tell you your gallery’s full.

Not only have you lost that set, but you’re gonna have to delete some much loved footage to make space for the rest of the fest.

Our advice is to wipe your phone completely (yes, completely!) before you head off. Back up your phone to the cloud or a computer and prepare to capture your weekend from every angle.

4. Setting the line-up as your lock screen

Constantly turning your phone on and off to search the line-up isn’t just time consuming, it’ll also drain your battery.

Cut the hassle by setting the schedule as your lock screen.

That way you only have to pick your phone up to check your next destination. Super simple, but super effective.

5. Saving the map to your phone

Lots of festivals will give you the map and line-up as part of an app. Sounds convenient, but in reality it’s still using data every time you open it.

Taking a screenshot of the festival map or downloading a PDF version to your phone will save you having to connect to the internet every time you need the loo or a bacon butty. It’ll also conserve your battery.

6. Set up ‘find my friends’

Billy wandered off AGAIN? We all have that one friend who seems to get sucked up by the crowd.

Whether you’ve got a wanderer on board, or you just want to see different acts, the Find My Friends app is the ultimate fail-safe way of locating your friends from the palm of your hand.

Got more festival wisdom to share?

Join the conversation on the giffgaff community forum and get the vibes pumping.