Tried to find these new slap bracelets and contacted ShopDisney. The woman I spoke with said they are not available yet and had no idea when they will be available. It is amazing how clueless so many Disney representatives are. They are either clueless or Disney tells them to lie about such things. Very annoying.
My wife sent me this image, apparently from DFB. To modify a McDonald’s catchphrase…“Not lovin’ it.”
But, this means they are apparently available.
Ugly!
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They look so cheap and nasty! I’m sure kids will love them, and I’m equally sure they will lose them.
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OK, I’m old, have no kids, and am behind the times. What is a “slap bracelet”?
As for aesthetics, I want something as sleek and as thin as possible - like the original MBs. I don’t want something that looks like it came out a play set designed for 6 year olds…
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It’s a vinyl or cloth wrapped metal band that wraps around your wrist when you slap it on your arm. They’ve been around a long time. I got one on a disney vacation over 30 years ago. But not from disney.
I have no trouble with the idea of a slap band MB…but seriously…the execution of these? It is like they had some high-school aged Disney Interns who were tasked to create a new design for the MB and this is what they came up with.
I just want the ability to register my phone to use for park entry and FPP.
As one who specializes in Bluetooth and has been involved in various wireless development, including NFC, I can understand why Disney would be holding off on such an idea. Unfortunately, correct implementation of such functionality to support that is spotty at best across phone manufacturers. Many phones don’t have Bluetooth LE (which Magic Bands use), and even more don’t have NFC, which is necessary for tapping in, etc.
So, I can imagine the headache Disney would have debugging issues where guests who thought they could use their phones to tap in, etc., run into issues. The problem would likely be out of Disney’s control…and, as we all know, they have enough trouble getting things working well with technology they DO control.
That’s fair, but you’d think they could qualify certain phones as “approved”
And there’s also the issue with phone batteries dying.
At one point in my career, we had to test for phone compatibility with our headunit software. We had a phone library with more than 600 phones, and more added every quarter. It quickly became unwieldy.
ETA: And we didn’t just have to test phone compatibility, but the phone in combination with the various OS versions the phone might have. For example, every time Apple would release a new iOS major version, we’d see a HUGE number of new bugs that would take them as long as a year to find and fix…about the time they would come out with a NEW major iOS version. 
Plus disney couldn’t track you or sell you more stuff as easily. So definitely not going to put in more effort for less rewards.
I hope everyone else wants the slap bracelets so there’s good inventory of the regular Magic Bands for me.
Not ordering these for my trip in April unless I get to try them out and see how easy they will be to lose. Also, things that stick out (particularly the snowflake on the frozen one) seem like they would be an inconvenience to me.