I like your idea, but you should take it one step further. People generally don't care how strong their signal is, just whether it works or not. So, really, we don't need bars, we just need one icon to tell us if it has a strong-enough signal or not. For those technophiles that have super-PDA phones, they should have an app that gives them every concievable piece of data on their signal, including strength, data rate, cell tower number, etc. They love that stuff! But the other 95% of us just need a "yes" or a "no."

I mean, honestly, are you really not going to make that call if you only have one bar, and wait until later for a stronger signal? No. You're going to do what everyone does, which is try to make the call anyway just to see if maybe it goes through. The only reason we need the signal indicator, at all, is so we can look down at our phone, AFTER our call fails, and figure out why it failed. So, my vote is for "yes" or "no" and let's leave it at that.