Disney World has changed in a lot of ways throughout the past few decades, but one of the biggest ones is how much you use your phone now.
Spaceship Earth
In the past decade, using your phone in Disney World has become a necessity if you want to do all you want to get done — you’ve gotta use it to check wait times, book Lightning Lane Multi Pass or Single Pass selections, join a Virtual Queue, and you can also use it to see your PhotoPass photos and mobile order food. Sure, you can do Disney World without your phone, but it does make things harder. This means that you’ll be using up a lot of your battery in the park, and it’s important to have a phone that can handle everything. We did the research, and these are the phones that will NOT survive a Disney World day easily.
Now, we’re not saying these phones are bad, but you’ll want to pay close attention to your battery life and make sure you have a portable charger to give it an extra boost when it needs it.
My Disney Experience app
According to this recent Electronics Hub article, one of the worst smartphones to have when it comes to battery life is the iPhone SE2, which was released in 2020. This phone has an average battery life of 1821 mAh (milliampere-hour), which roughly translates to about 9 hours. Not terrible, but that was when using 4G, not 5G, which will deplete your battery faster. In comparison, the best iPhone battery life since 2018 is the iPhone 15 Pro Max, which has an average of 4422 mAh.
©Apple
However, the Galaxy A2 Core is also a phone that may struggle in Disney World, as it has one of the lowest mAh scores of Samsung phones since 2018 at 2600 mAh. Now, that’s still worlds better than the lowest iPhone score, but it’s not the best Samsung can get. According to Samsung’s website, the Galaxy S24, Ultra Galaxy S23, Ultra Galaxy S22, Ultra Galaxy A55, and Galaxy A35 phones all have 5,000 mAh, the most powerful of current Samsung phones.
©Samsung
We also encourage you to watch out for Samsung phones that use snapdragon processors. A Reddit thread from around a year ago featured many complains from Samsung customers about Samsung phones with this processor involved, as they performed significantly worse than the same Samsung models with exynos processors (however, many commenters weren’t happy with either, for the record).
©Samsung
If we’re being honest here, iPhones have some of the lowest mAh scores out there, and many people have complained about the way the battery depletes faster than other phones over time. Apple has a median score of 3187 mAh since 2018, and when other brands such as Samsung have a “worst” score closer to 2,600 mAh, that’s not great.
Our Bibbidi Bobbidi Bow Pink Phone Case on an iPhone
Whatever phone you take to Disney World, we hope it’s able to do everything you need it to, and can capture all your wonderful memories! Be sure to stay tuned to DFB for all the latest Disney World tips and tricks!
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We’ve never had a phone run out at Disney. We usually go as a party of 2 or 3. If this was a massive problem for us we would just use our phone’s sequentially. So just one of us would use their phone, then if that ran out, then the next person’s phone would be used. But we’ve never needed to.
We have Magic Bands so use that for park entry, entry into virtual queues, buying goods and food. My husband takes photos on his phone. No need for me to do that as well. We might look up the odd wait time or showtime but we still use the info boards round the parks too. We book virtual queues on the phone too but you only need to do that once or twice a day, and not every day come to that.