Comment 16 for bug 1421623

"From all location providers available, GPS is most accurate one, unfortunately also most power hungry and slowest to gain lock. This is reason we use all other providers to get faster, though less accurate, coarse location using combination os visible wifi access point and cellular cells."

As I have said three times now, just Wi-Fi + cellular network info is not one of the options. It is in Android, and both Rex and I have mentioned here the possibility of adding it to Ubuntu -- but right now, it is not one of the options. If it was, you would be correct: you could save power by not using GPS. But the choice is between GPS only, or GPS + Wi-Fi + cellular network info. Since both of them use GPS, neither of them save power by not using GPS. And after seven months, you have still not given a single example of any moment where GPS only could possibly be more accurate than GPS + Wi-Fi + cellular network info, while I've given multiple examples where the opposite is true.

Your GPRS analogy fails for the same reason: "GPRS only" is not one of the available options, just like "Wi-Fi and cellular networks only" is not one of the available options.

The reason we provide multiple options, as explained in the UI, is nothing to do with power use. It is simply that the HERE option requires you to accept HERE's terms and conditions, while the GPS-only option does not. If we didn't care about providing location detection for people who don't want to accept the terms and conditions, we could just use HERE as the only option, make location detection an on/off toggle (like in iOS), and not need any further settings.