Smartphone Apps Used To Track Royal Wedding

Smartphone and tablet users are faced with a truly staggering range of apps to track all the trivia and information associated with Friday’s Royal wedding, expected to be watched by an estimated two billion people.

The Sun newspaper, for example, has announced that it is publishing a special edition of its tabloid newspaper for the iPad.

And ITN has revealed that its Royal Wedding app is available from Nokia’s Ovi app store.

Apps Galore

Hello Magazine, that well known bastion all things cheesy and celebrity, has its own app known as The Royal Wedding by Hello!, for the iPad and iPhone, free of charge. Trinity Mirror has an iPhone and iPad app (Royal Wedding – The Wills & Kate Story) priced at £1.19 on iTunes.

Meanwhile, it seems that the Royal Wedding is proving to be hugely popular in the United States. Indeed, it is said that a third of all of the media publications covering the wedding are from America. NBC News, for example, has its own iPad app dubbed “The Royal Wedding by NBC News” available free from the US iTunes store.

And BBC America has a free app (BBC America’s Royal Wedding Insider) for Apple and Android devices.

Smaller players are also getting involved. For example a Glasgow-based wedding company, Starweds, runs an online wedding gift service for couples who would prefer monetary gifts rather than household items.

It has just created an free app for anyone planning their wedding day. The app is essentially a directory that allows users to phone, email or visit Scottish wedding suppliers’ websites. It utilises the GPS system in the iPhone to show where the nearest businesses are.

Websites And Twitter

And of course, for those who just cannot get enough of the wedding, there is an official wedding website where users can get up-to-date information about the big event.

The Twitter feed from Clarence House, the official residence of the Prince of Wales, also provides a blow by blow account of all the latest developments.

The countdown to the wedding is now its final stages. To this end mobile operators are bracing themselves for a surge in traffic by boosting network capacity, especially in Kate Middleton’s home village of Bucklebury.

Meanwhile preparations continue at Westminister Abbey, with the news that wedding guests will be unable to use their mobile phones thanks to the installation of signal-blocking technology.

This is a well known security measure often used in prisons, but its use in Westiminster Abbey is designed to minimise any potential disruption to the actual service from ringing phones or people providing Twitter updates etc.