Can anyone suggest an app or method to periodically (say once every hour or so) auto turn on the gps location and then have something like gps tracker from instamapper start up and update the web based logs just once and then switch off and disable the gps? My understanding is that having gps location on is a massive power waste. Is that right?

The simple GPS running in the background is not a battery problem, at all.

A GPS mapping program running in the background does present battery drain issues.

Hmm, it seems my battery life is substantially less with gps location turned on. And I would expect it to be since the gps receivers are on. Anyone else noticed this?

when the gps is on, it doesn't use much power, if any at all, since it doesn't transmit by default when no app is using it. i think it's in the same power array as the main board, so i doubt it can ever be turned off completely.

but i do agree with rileyrg, when gps tracker is running in the background, it uses quite a bit of juice....

i've had mine set to various transmit intervals, did not notice much difference in battery level drain between short and long intervals. i don't know what 'buffer size' means to the app, maybe changing that setting may help consume less power ?

in future releases, some apps that many ppl use might get consolidaed into a newer OS version, hopefully RIM will include a tracking subroutine, as well as a remote nuke subroutine for non-BES users....