| Phones already do that. It's the bar graph we already have. There are multiple reasons why it's not terribly useful: 1.) Signal quality depends on many different variables, and fluctuates wildly from second to second. You can have a great signal at one moment, but if the guy next to you starts a call, the radio in their phone will ramp up to the full 500mW, and drowns out the tower. You can have a signal graph that realistically reflects "signal strength", and it'll jitter constantly, and the grandmas will complain. 2.) Marketing. Good overview: http://www.dansdata.com/gz084.htm As you may have noticed from every cell phone advertisement in the last decade, marketing is heavily invested in the notion of bars. It's in brands, logos, ad copy, everything. More bars are better. If engineers ran the company, they'd just stick the SNR in dBm at the top of the screen and it'd be wonderfully pure and objective; and everybody else would hate it, and the company would go bankrupt. So we have "bars", and the bars lie. |