Hasta La Gadget!

Before the Gadget Lab crew dives into this week’s tech news, we raise our phones to celebrate the removal of Twitter’s god-awful QuickBar — that annoying black bar that appears at the top of your Twitter feed to show advertising and trending topics.

It was so putrid that people called it the “DickBar.” Fortunately, Twitter took the feedback to heart and abolished the QuickBar in its latest software update.

In other news, some customers have found that their brand-new “4G-capable” phones (such as the Motorola Atrix and the HTC Inspire) aren’t actually uploading data at 4G speeds. In fact, some of their speeds are even slower than existing 3G phones. The problem? AT&T just hasn’t flipped the switch yet to enable 4G speeds on these phones. Talk about lame.

We’re disappointed that there likely won’t be an iPhone 5 from Apple this summer, even though we’ve gotten a new iPhone every summer for the past four years. We’re guessing it’s because the white iPhone 4 still hasn’t shipped due to production problems, and Apple wants to give that model some shelf life before introducing an iPhone 5. Plus, a Verizon iPhone only just came out recently.

On the Android front, Amazon opened an Android Appstore last week, and many people probably don’t realize the security risks involved in shopping in Amazon’s store. Getting apps from a third-party app store such as Amazon’s requires checking off an option to enable installations from unknown sources, which can subject you to harmful malware, just like a Windows PC browsing the web.

Already this week, we’ve seen a trojan horse appear inside third-party app stores threatening to infect Android phones allowing installations from unknown sources.

Like the show? You can also get the Gadget Lab video podcast on iTunes, or if you don’t want to be distracted by our ugly mugs, check out the Gadget Lab audio podcast. Prefer RSS? You can subscribe to the Gadget Lab video or audio podcast feeds. Thanks for listening and watching!

Or listen to the audio here:

Gadget Lab audio podcast No. 110

http://downloads.wired.com/podcasts/assets/gadgetlabaudio/GadgetLabAudio0110.mp3