Embrace the festival season on your mobile

The most important piece of kit at any festival (other than your tent and your sleeping bag of course) will be your mobile phone. It’s the only way to stay in touch with your friends when surrounded by hundreds of thousands of people… Christ, what did we do before? Oh yeah, we got lost for three days.

These days however, we have the technology to stay in touch with our wasted mates 24/7, and there are plenty of accessories, phone features and websites to help make your festival experience even more fun and stress-free.

One of the most important things is to make sure your phone has plenty of juice for the duration of the festival.

For the more organised of you who remember to charge your phone up in the car on the drive down to Glastonbury, Reading, Leeds or the Isle of Wight, the Sony Ericcson CLA-60 may be for you (well, only if you own a SE phone.) The CLA-60 will plug straight into your car's cigarette lighter and start charging straight away. Alternatively, if you didn’t travel by car, Sony Ericsson’s CMT-60 can charge your phone via two AA batteries… pretty neat.

Motorola also has a charger ready to rough it. The pocket-sized P790 power charger plugs directly into your Motorola handset and powers up your phone without the aid of irritating wires. Just charge it up before you hit the festival and you’ll always have enough battery power on hand to see you through even the heaviest weekend.

If all of the above sounds a little to hi-tech for you, why not opt for a good old-fashioned wind-up phone charger. The Eurohike wind-up phone charger is also a torch and a conversation starter. Available in four different colours, it comes with adaptors for Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Samsung, Motorola and Siemens mobiles. Just three minutes of winding creates enough power to use your phone for nearly 10 minutes - perfect in emergencies – and the three LED lights can emit up to 20 minutes of light after just one minute’s winding. For only £12.99 you really can’t go wrong.

One of the main problems with going out on the lash anywhere is losing your phone and everything in it. We’ve all been there - you wake up with your face in a cowpat, in the middle of nowhere without your phone. Those numbers that could help guide you back to sanity are gone. The website Mobyko can help you get your life back on track, it allows you to upload your contacts and pictures straight from your phone, and it also allows you to send texts to contacts via a PC. It’s quick, easy and, for the meantime, it’s free. Check it out at www.mobyko.com.

Nokia is also providing festival goers with new features this year. In collaboration with the Download festival it’s giving music lovers the chance to use a unique mobile festival guide. Simple to use, compatible on most handsets, packed with information and free, it’s set to be a festival must-have. As part of Nokia’s ‘Rock Up & Play’ experience the mobile phone manufacturer will be giving mobile users the chance to upload information on the Download festival direct to their phones; including stage listings and maps that can be zoomed in and out of for a really in-depth view of the vast site.

Users will be able to create their own personal schedule by adding the bands they want to see to their schedule and will also receive alerts to any changes in stage times so they don’t miss out on their favourite bands.

For more information check out www.nokia.co.uk/rockupandplay.