Why is the Location Services icon always present? I updated my iPhone 4 to iOS 5 last night. In iOS 4, the purple GPS arrow appeared next to the battery indicator when an app I was using (or had running in the background) was actively accessing my location data. Now, it seems to be on all the time, even when I have no apps running. 

Does this icon now simply denote the fact that I have Location Services turned on, instead of notifying me that they are being used (like it used to)?
It's a new feature in ios 5 called "region Monitoring"

The reason it's active even if the app is closed is that this feature runs in iOS 5 core and notifies all apps that are registered when they have entered or left a specific geo-fence.

Reminders does that when you use a location based reminder.

Although the location icon appears at all time. This actually has very minimal impact on the battery due to apple really optimizing this feature by using cell and wifi mostly.