Leaving the safety and relative sanity of our London office for a six day soiree at Glastonbury, we thought carefully about what gadgets to pack. Being veterans of Glasto – and all too familiar with the minging mudbath of 2005 – we made sure to pack ample waterproof clothing and bring along plenty of plastic bags for wrapping up our gadgets against the inevitable rain.
Stocking up
After some consideration, we abandoned the idea of taking along a basic phone instead of our fully featured Treo 650, figuring that we’ll be needing a decent mobile for checking email, web browsing, texting and tracking any incoming tornados and tidal waves.
Although the battery life is pretty good on the Treo, six days is a long time away when you’re constantly ringing and texting ‘confused’ mates on site, so we also packed a Seido 2400mAh extended battery and an emergency power charger.
We did look at some of the solar phone chargers but predicted the legendary Glastonbury weather would probably only provide enough solar energy to illuminate the screen for a nano-second before conking out.
Wind up chargers were also another consideration, but try as we might we couldn’t find any compact ones for the Treo in time.
Although we had backstage access to the press tent with its free wi-fi facilities, we didn’t fancy dragging along our precious laptop, although we began to see the point of the Palm Foleo which would have been perfect for the job.
We wanted to get some decent photos of the festival, so we packed our Nikon D80 and Ricoh GX100 cameras, taking along back-up batteries for both.
Although there’s some excellent back-up devices for storing images on the move, with high quality SD cards being available at ridiculously cheap knock down prices (e.g. we picked up a 2GB Sandisk Extreme III for just 18 quid), we packed our bags with a selection of cards and headed off to the badlands of Somerset.
Tomorrow, in Part Two you can find out how the gadgets coped with the very wet weather conditions of Glastonbury 2007.