When playing Ingress I find that both GPS and WiFi (each by themselves) provide an acceptable location accuracy. My question is what draws the most power?
I'm interested in technical information about what goes on in my phone when I use either service to find my location: how much power does the WiFi radio take compared to the GPS?
My thinking is that
Enabling WiFi requires powering on a chip and using an antenna that both sends and receives data. Is that correct when I'm not actually connected to any network, i.e., just using the SSIDs along with cell tower IDs to determine my location?
Enabling GPS requires powering on an otherwise dead chip that does expensive computations to compute the location. Is the constant GPS computations really expensive in terms of power drained?
My phone is a LG Nexus 4, if that matters.