Unfortunately the wallet silently fails, so you lose any privacy benefits if it can not connect.
I think connecting to a Tor hidden node makes more sense for now, since it's already authenticated and encrypted. The wallet currently doesn't connect to those though.
If he's running the default version of Android Wallet then it would still hve the bloom filter to protect privacy to some extent (at the cost of bandwitdh, obviously). CubicEarth, did you end up setting this up?