How to Make Your iPhone the Ultimate Music Festival Companion
Posted 06/15/2009 at 7:01pm
| by Mike Spitalieri
Spirit of Radiowaves

Before the show gets under way you'll want to test your data connection for posting tweets, statuses, posting snaps and otherwise boosting your indie cred on the internet. You can test your bandwidth and latency in Safari here, or with this Network Speed Test App. Be sure to test with both EDGE and 3G and set your connection accordingly. If 3G and EDGE prove too flaky you can leech some free Wi-Fi. WiFiFoFum displays a map with all
the hotspots in range, while Spots provides a database of thousands of
business Wifi hotspots across America.
Get This Party Started
Parking
lots are good for two things: parking your car and tailgating. And
tailgating requires tunes. If you've got a car kit (We prefer the Scosche Digital Tuneshift) you can either crank
out music according to your favorite genius list, or you
can invoke the Demons of Rock and Roll Past with Wolfgang's Vault, an
App that streams thousands of classic concerts over a 3G or Wi-Fi
connection completely for free.
It's a Social Thing, Baby

Concerts have always been social events, but Twitter, Facebook and MySpace have transformed them into hyper-social experiences. We've already showed you our picks for best iPhone Twitter App, and the standard MySpace and Facebook Apps still get the job done. Just be sure to configure your social networking accounts to
accept updates over SMS in case the data network starts to chug. Better yet, Ping.fm will update all of your networks with a single text.
In addition to standard social sites, some
bands distribute their own social networking Apps. NIN:access displays the
NIN.com forums, location based chat for concert-goers, plus tour images and video. The Dave Matthews Band and Fall Out Boy All Access Apps also offer social networking and photo uploads, as well.
Some other bands with iPhone apps:
Sara Evans
Spinal Tap
Reba McEntire
Photo Shoot

In order to take those candid stage snaps you can use your new iPhone 3G S and Auto Focus features built into iPhone OS 3.0. If you want to more after effects like Cropping, Grayscale, Antique and Sepia, Photon is a great free App that fits the bill nicely. You can then upload your pics to your favorite image hosting service like Flickr. Klick is a great free App for uploading and browsing Flickr photos. Remember to geotag and #hashtag your photos so other people at the show can find them.
After Party
When the lights flood the stage for the last encore, and the final bars of a slow jam close out the night, you can raise your iPhone in the air with a virtual Zippo Lighter App to show your support. But the party's just starting after the last encore. Maybe, just maybe, you can snag a hot after-party tip off of Twitter, which many Rock Stars including Trent Reznor, Jane's Addiction Guitarist Dave Navarro, and John Mayer actively use. For a more complete list check here. You may not be invited to trash any hotel rooms, but you can listen in as Trent trash talks a dissatisfied fan.