iPhone Battery Saving Tips While at Walt Disney World and Disneyland

This post was written by my Disney buddy and fellow iPhone evangelist, Alex Goldman.

Having been a Disney Annual Passholder for the second year in a row and also having my iPhone for almost two years, I have had days at the parks where I ended up having my battery almost depleted. I figured out after a while that for a few hours, I did not need my email notifications, game notifications and faster 3G Internet while at The Most Magical Place On Earth. I’m assuming that most people who will be visiting the parks may be able to benefit from my tips and hopefully not have to worry about their iPhone’s battery dying while being far away from a charger. Included are screenshots from my iPhone 3G of where to go, and my recommendations on what to disable for the day.

First let’s start out with your home screen. Here is where you can find your Settings button, unless you rearranged your home screen.

Once you locate the Settings button, press it and it will open the following menu.

You won’t be needing your Wi-Fi turned on while in the parks so that’s an easy feature that can surely save you some battery life once it’s turned off. You access this menu by pressing the Wi-Fi button from the Settings Menu. Once in the Wi-Fi Networks menu, swipe the ON button to the OFF position.

My next tip is to go to the Notifications menu. You access this by pressing the Settings back button. Once in here you will see the applications which have notification capabilities. I’m sure you won’t be needing your Facebook or Words With Friends Push Notifications.

To disable the Notifications, simply swipe the ON button to OFF and you won’t be receiving notifications to your phone.

Another tip is to disable the 3G on your iPhone which places it on the EDGE network. AT&T coverage is good in Orlando, but if there are so many people on the 3G service in a small area it becomes very slow and spotty. Go back to the main Settings menu, and press general. Once in the General menu, press Network.

To disable the 3G service, swipe the ON button to OFF on the Enable 3G portion of the screen. It will explain that “Using 3G loads data faster, but may decrease battery life.” Even with the 3G turned off, I am able to send Tweets using my favorite Twitter App Tweetie to my twitter account @Al3xg. The only slowdown would be posting photos, but it’s not really too noticeable after awhile.

Another good tip would be to lower your screen brightness. You access the Brightness menu from the settings main menu. If the screen is too high or bright during the day, it’s extremely simple to go back and lower or raise it.

Like I had mentioned earlier, I don’t choose to have my email notifications while in the parks, or actually in general. On my MacBook Pro I launch my Mail program whenever I want to read my mail. So saying that, I have the email notifications off on my phone. This also helps with saving power. You access the email push menu by pressing the Mail, Contacts, Calendar button on the main menu page of the Settings menu.

While in this menu press Fetch New Data.

From within this menu, disable Push feature by swiping the ON button to OFF. Also instead of having it your email Fetched at either 15, 30 or 60 minutes, just disable the Fetch and select Manually so you will have to open the Mail app to check your email.

I’ve also noticed that some attractions like Pirates of the Caribbean don’t have any service at all and are pretty much Dead Zones. Get it.. dead zones? Maybe it’s the ghost of the pirates! Well in that case, you won’t be using the phone service. If you go to the main page of the Settings menu, there is an area called Airplane Mode. I highly recommend turning Airplane Mode ON during the line and attraction for this and probably many of the other WDW attractions. To turn on the Airplane Mode, just swipe the OFF button next to Airplane Mode to ON and the little airplane in the top left will fly out.