Mobile Phone Call Quality Warning System: Useful or Redundant?

We were talking today in Campfire—Giz’s virtual office—about Apple’s newly uncovered patent on a system that warns you about bad quality or dropping cellular or Wi-Fi connections “ahead of time.” Jason thought it could be useful to know that, so you could just avoid making the call. I thought that it wouldn’t be useful at all, because if I needed to call, I would call anyway—and if the connection dropped, I would call again. Are we missing something? Do you really want to know the quality of a call beforehand, especially if you are travelling, and said quality is constantly changing as you move? And don’t mobile phones already warn you about dropping calls?

The moment the quality starts going to hell, you know it may drop, so I imagined that if my telephone warned me about it, not only would I not find it useful—as I already knew about it—but I would think it would be totally annoying. Like:

iPhone: “Warning: your call may be about to drop.”
Me: “No fracking kidding!”

What do you think?

Gawker Media polls require Javascript; if you’re viewing this in an RSS reader, click through to view in your Javascript-enabled web browser.

[Apple Insider]