Jacob Hall, Editor-in-Chief of TapSauce | APPS | 01.26.2012 @ 9:00 am
The App: Disney Mobile Magic
The Device: HTC Incredible (Android)
The Price: Free
The Basics: As major theme parks strive to create new and innovative attractions, the technology surrounding the parks themselves evolve in stride. Admission to the park now requires a fingerprint scan that links your ticket to your identity. Programs like Disney’s Fastpass and Universal Studios Express allow visitors to bypass lengthy lines and get to the front of the queue in a matter of minutes. A smartphone app that assists the user in navigating the park was an inevitability, especially since antsy and bored line-waiters now have the option to whip out Angry Birds instead of chatting with their family. In a nutshell, the Disney Mobile Magic app exists to give you an overview of the entirety of Disney World, providing information and locations on shops, the waiting time for attractions and letting you reserve seats at restaurants. It does a lot and goes a long way to removing the need for those pesky, easily lost guide maps and schedules…but is it enough?
The Review: I recently spent a week in Orlando, Florida as part of this thing called a “vacation” and I was able to give the Disney Mobile Magic app a thoroughly reasonable test in its native habitat. Placing all of the intricacies of a theme park as large as Disney World in a single (free!) app that is constantly updating and adjusting its content must have been a nearly overwhelming undertaking, so the fact that the app works pretty darn well is a testament to everyone involved (and the fact that Disney is advertising the thing all over their brochures and park maps shows that the parent company is obviously pleased with the results).
When you open the app, it automatically locates where you are on Disney property and takes you to the proper page (and if you’re not on Disney property, you are taken to a main menu where you can browse at your leisure). The layout is so simple that it’s almost (almost!) ugly, but it also means that a child could open this app and find their way around…which is appropriate, considering a massive chunk of the target audience for Disney parks. The default menu allows you to select one of the four Disney World parks (Magic Kingdom, Epcot, Hollywood Studios and Animal Kingdom), one of the individual resorts (far too many to dash off here), restaurants, Downtown Disney locations and several other categories that not even a theme park aficionado like myself can work up enthusiasm for (the ESPN Wide World of Sports Complex? This exists?). Selecting one park, resort or attraction will open another new list of available options: Guide Map, Attractions, Characters, Dining, Today’s Events, Weather, Games, My Favorites, Transportation, Shopping and Guest Services. It’s a big list, but if you know exactly what you’re looking for (and if you’re pulling out this app while in the middle of Disney World, you probably do), finding the right option is a piece of cake.
Each category serves a specific purpose. The Guide Map option is the most basic of them, letting you examine a recreation of the park map as seen in the brochures. The Attractions option, though, will probably be your most used button. When selected, it lists every ride and attraction in the park (listed in order of distance from your current location). Selecting an individual attraction will provide you with basic information about the ride, like height requirements, safety information and a brief synopsis, but more importantly, it will list the wait time. This means you can be in line for The Haunted Mansion, wonder how long the wait is over at Splash Mountain and find out right on your phone. On occasion, the system got a little funky and I was given vague information like “moderate wait” or “long wait,” but the vast majority of the time, I was given an accurate and approximate wait time. There are several unofficial Disney parks apps available for download that will list wait times like this, but when compared side-by-side, the official, Disney-sanctioned version was correct 100% of the time while the unofficial version was right about 50% of the time. Over my week at the park, this app proved vital in helping plan the day, checking the waxing and the waning of lines around various parks and avoiding the crowds. It’s was so useful that the times when it encountered hiccups stand out more than they probably should.
The Characters option will prove invaluable for people looking to get pictures with costumed characters. When selected, you are given a list of categories, ranging from “Mickey and Friends” to “Pixar Pals.” From those categories, you can choose a specific character and see when, where and if they’ll be making an appearance in the park that day. The only problem here is that the list is so immense, that it may prove difficult to navigate. At first glance, a master list of who will be at the park for sure seems to be missing. Also of incredible use is the Dining page, which allows you to filter nearby restaurants by price and style and make reservations straight from the app and Today’s Events, which gives you a rundown of whatever unique things are happening that day.
The options become less essential as you go down the list. Weather is the estimated temperature for the next couple of days, Games are a series of dull, Disney-related minigames (presumable to keep you occupied in line), My Favorites allows you to collect a list of your favorite rides, shops and restaurants, Transportation tells you how to get to other parks and locations (although the lack of a full map means that the advice ultimately boils down to “get on the bus labeled Animal Kingdom to go to Animal Kingdom”), Shopping tells you the locations of various shops (but not what they sell, which is disappointing) and Guest Services pulls up a park map with the locations of the various guest relations booths marked. After the incredible usefulness of the top items, these categories all seem useless, almost like they were tossed into to pad the app out.
I can’t help but think of the things that this app needs. Above all, the app does little to assist with navigation and the fact that the Guide Map option only takes you to the same map that defeated you when you picked it up at the front gate is a little insulting. Disney needs to take a look at the premiere navigation apps (coughGoogleMapscough) and implement the walking and driving directions and options seen there. The Walt Disney World property is the size of Manhattan and navigating it can be a chore. If this comes along in a future update, I’ll be willing to overlook much of the dead weight here.
Overall, though? The stuff that works far outweighs the stuff that doesn’t and if you have an Android smartphone (the app is rather inexplicably not available on iOS platforms) and are planning a Florida vacation with your family, this is a no-brainer.
The Grade: B+