How does GPS work?

[chimera]

How does the GPS on this phone work? I have seen some bettery suggestions to the effect of turn off the GPS to save battery power, does this mean that just having the GPS turned on under the location setting "Use GPS sattelites" uses significant bettery power, even when I am not using a program that would use the GPS, like google maps?

Thank you for any help on this matter, it is mush appreciated as I go about trying to understand my new phone (which randomly turns itself on and off)

 

[yojoe600]

the gps does not use much battery unless something is using it like maps or weather... so i leave it on all the time so if i lose my phone i can find it

 

[bass_lover1]

The only time anything is actually using the GPS chip is when you see the icon in the status bar.

For the most part the phone gets your location by triangulating between cell towers (it's a rough estimate). Otherwise only when you open apps that want to be pin-point in terms of your location, like Maps/Navigation, Locale and the likes is the a-GPS actually used.

I leave it on constantly and it very rarely shows up under my battery usage statistics.