Here's a brief catch-up with this week's news :

European iPhone sales figures

First official sales figures for O2 in te UK and Orange in France were released this week. In the end of December, O2 has activated 200 000 iPhones as projected while Orange claims to have sold 70 000 units of which more than 85% were linked to an Orange subscription.

Orange's figures fall quite short as the company had initially projected from 50 000 to 100 000 units to be sold from November 29 to December 31.

No news from T-Mobile's Germany sales so far.

iMac shaped MacBook dock and LED keyboard patent filings

Among patents recently filed by Apple, two are very promising. The first describes a dock for the MacBook which has the shape of an iMac and, by the way, includes a screen.

The second describes a keyboard with a little screen on each key, allowing endless key customization possibilities. It means the same keyboard can be used for example in qwerty, azerty, Japaneze mode and applications can even send whatever picture/logo to each key.

Detailed analyis on these patents can be found here (via HRMPF) [1].

Blu-Ray adopted by Warner Bros

It looks like Blu-ray is winning [2] the war of HD mediums against HD-DVD as Warner Bros has announced it decided to support the Blu-Ray technology rather than HD-DVD for the distribution of its HD content. The studio previously supported the HD-DVD format both the HD-DVD and the Blu-Ray formats.

Meanwhile, in a recent report, American Technology Research analyst Shan Wu claimed to have sources who informed him that Apple could start using the Blu-Ray technology on new Macs which will be announced in January. Analysts have historically often been inaccurate in their reports about future Apple products.