We review recent progress in the perturbative calculations for semileptonic and hadronic B meson decays with an emphasis on the phenomenological implications of the next-to-next-to-leading order (NNLO) corrections. Specifically, we consider CP-averaged branching ratios of tree-dominated B → pi pi/pi rho/rho rho decays and the inclusive determination of |V_ub| from B → X_u l nu.