I agree. I have a crappy Motorola flip phone. Most of the time, the one-line display on the outer shell has the time, and it's really convenient. BUT, when I have no service, it instead says "No service."

This is SUPER annoying e.g. when I'm underground on the metro - I know I have no service, I just want to see the time. Why not keep the clock and just use the bars indicator to tell me I have no service?

Actually, for Sprint/Nextel they may just want to alert me to the rare moments when I have service. But I digress...

I had no problem building it without sound on a Slackware 12.1 system, and after installing portaudio the sound is working as well.

I agree about the binaries though; especially having a prebuilt Windows binary.