The Webkit team, those intrepid guys who have this forever on-going work-in-progress to improve and speed up Safari, Apple’s web browser, has unveiled a version of Webkit that incorporates a new Javascript rendering engine called Squirrelfish, which purports to jack up Safari performance to 1.6x better. Not quite ready yet for prime time, it’s still being tweaked and fixed before they roll it out.

Squirrelfish, if you really must know, is a register-based, direct threaded, high-level bytecode engine with a sliding register window calling convention made for open-source browsers. Huh?

Bring it on. All we need to know is, will it blend?

Don’t look now, but some units of the Macbook Air being sold on the gray market come with non-American keyboards, specifically Western Spanish ones which confound users because of its strange and unfamiliar physical layout and even more confusing keyboard assignments—pressing a key is always an adventure. I know this first hand because I procured one such Macbook Air for one of my bosses.

The sealed box looked typical for all intents and purposes, until we opened it up. The sparse documentation was all in Spanish, and the keyboard looked very odd and things quickly went downhill when we started typing on it. To our consternation a lot of the non-alphabetical characters that came out on the bright screen were totally different from the ones we pressed, going by what was printed on the keytop. Us Filipinos used to a US layout were in immediate trouble. Talk about lost in translation.

Strangely, info on alternative keyboard layouts were sparse. It took a while but we eventually found a solution for the key mismatching. From the outset it was obviously a matter of changing keyboard profiles—but which one?

For Macbooks, Macbook Pros and Airs with a Western Spanish keyboard, just go to System Preferences/International/Input Menu and select Spanish - ISO. If you don’t have it in your list of choices, you’ll have to dig out your install discs and load up the Spanish language choices so Spanish - ISO pops up as an option. After this, your keys won’t lie to you anymore; what you press is what you’ll get.

Now you’ll just have to live with the odd placement of keys, but that’s a whole lot better than the guessing game you had before. If you find other odd keyboard layouts, not just on Macs but on external keyboards from Apple, you can just use this method to pin down the right input menu profile.

An uncovered patent made by Apple reveals plans to create an iPod powered by light.

MacRumors reports that it has found a patent by Apple to create an iPod (and presumably an iPhone) with a solar panel under the LCD screen by which it can generate additional power.  The patent postulates a thin three-level sandwich of sorts that incorporates a touch sensitive layer, a display and a photovoltaic panel. The unique Apple twist is that by doing so it won’t have to create a separate charging panel; it’ll look the same, only you don’t have to charge it as often, or at all. With its giant screen, the iPhone’ll be especially energy-efficient.

The patent also mentions that the multiple solar cells would be coupled directly with specific components within the device, including the memory and the data-processing system.

Talk about hot gadgets. This is way cool, but don’t hold your breath just yet.

Many Mac users have been hoping for safer, faster Solid State Drives in their lappies ever since the Air was launched with the option. In fact, many secretly pray that SSDs become (cheaply) available with all new Macbooks, hopefully to be announced at the WWDC Jobs keynote in a few days, cost, capacity and availability notwithstanding.

But what about us with existing clunky and primitive old Macbooks and Macbook Pros? Will we be doomed to be forever looking from the sidelines, laboring under the slower, power-hungry and easily damaged old-fashioned harddrive?

Never fear, ExperCom is here!

ExperCom is offering a service that does SSD upgrades for both new and old Macbooks or Macbook Pros, at prices ranging from US$550 to US$899. Or you can buy preconfigured units directly from them at US$1649 for a white Macbook with a 60gb SSD or a Macbook Pro with a 120gb SSD at US$2649. No word if they’d do it for your tangerine toilet seat iBook G3, though.

Check out the site here. It even includes charts and explanations why SSDs will cure cancer and bring about world peace. That is, if you’re one of the few still sitting on the fence, mind-fogged by the black propropaganda being spread around by traditional harddrive manufactures that SSDs are fragile, low-capacity, expensive cr@p.

The temptation is great, but think I’ll hold off until they offer higher-capacity and cheaper SSDs - or upgrade to some future Mac altogether.

But it is something to think about, isn’t it?

So far, Apple’s mobile version of the Safari browser has only been seen on the iPhone screen. Previously it’s been ported for Windows on the desktop, but outside of Macs and iPhones, that’s the only non-Apple screen it’s been on. Until now, that is.

The new Samsung L870, a slider S60 smartphone running on Symbian 9.3 that was announced for the European market in April, will be available there beginning August. Its features were revealed today: it’s a tri-band GSM phone with a 3 megapixel camera, and comes with some apps, including a PIM homescreen plug-in and a business-card recognition function, but by far its most interesting and unique feature is that it’ll run Apple’s Safari browser on its 2.4″ QVGA display.

Seems like a solid phone. We don’t know yet how Safari’ll look or fare on a small screen (amazingly, it’ll be a full browser as opposed to a hobbled version), but we’re willing to bet it’ll be better than the S60 web browser. No word yet from either Samsung or Apple as to how this odd pairing came about, but maybe we’ll hear something at the WWDC.