Cruising w/ Turbo: How do I minimize WiFi use?

[pdarrah]

I'm taking my Turbo on a cruise soon and will be paying crazy prices for WiFi on board to keep in touch with my email (family business means you are NEVER 100% on vacation!). What all do I need to change so that it minimizes the use of background WiFi. I'm assuming I need to tell the Play Store & Amazon Apps to NOT do automatic updates. Is there anything else obvious I can configure? I'll be turning off Mobile Data so I'm not hit with that. I plan to turn the phone off at night and maybe even during the day when I'm going to busy for a couple hours. Just don't want to burn through my WiFi allotment (300MB for $40) before the week is over. (Looks like the day I'm in San Juan, PR I can turn on my mobile data as Verizon considers that part of the USA and not roaming.)

 

[GatsbyGlen]

Turn your phone off when you don't need it. Set an out of office reply that says you will not check anything until you return. Enjoy your vacation!

Sent from my DROID RAZR HD using Tapatalk

 

[pdarrah]

Well, it would be awesome if I could do that, but its a small family business & we will ALL be on the cruise. The office will be "closed" but we can't leave our customers with absolutely no contact for a week. (Since we are an international trading company, we can't even just assume that its a holiday week for everyone and they'll understand why we are closed!) I'm hoping to keep the amount of work any of us have to do to a minimum, but just setting an out of office reply & ignoring it all just isn't an option.

 

[doogald]

Settings / Data usage. Tap the menu control top right - turn on "restrict background data", turn off "auto-sync data".

However, that said, when I was traveling with my Droid Maxx I would find the first suddenly changed at times (which was fine most of the time, because I didn't have a WiFi data cap), so what I would do is turn on the WiFi radio when you want to use it and turn it off when you don't. There should be a power control widget that you can add to a home screen (or even more than one) to give one tap toggle for WiFi, or you can two finger drag down from the top to pull down the setup notification shade and long-press on the WiFi square to toggle the radio off and on.

Or, of course, as previously mentioned, turn the phone off when you don't need it.

 

[jasoraso]

In the Settings, you will find an "Accounts" section. This lists all the accounts that Sync something on your phone. You may be able to manually disable sync for the apps in that section, or you may need to go into the apps that are listed in there and turn off their auto sync functions. This is includes "auto-upload" for dropbox, or Google+, Music sync for Google Play Music, and all the many sync options for each google account on your phone. I suggest you disable all of the sync options, and then sync manually for the items you need (i.e. email).

 

[pdarrah]

Thanks for the feedback. I'll definitely be turning WiFi off when I'm not using it I hadn't thought of a couple of your suggestions, so those will help.