Weekly Highlights: BlackBerry Buyout Hype, Apple's New Beats Strategy And More

BlackBerry has been a rumored takeover target for years, but a buyout still hasn't happened.

On Friday the stock rose suddenly and mysteriously, begging the question: What are investors buying?

"It's gotta be one thing," Sean Udall, CIO of Quantum Trading Strategies and author of The TechStrat Report, told Benzinga.

"There has been a consistent rash -- and so far incorrect, by the way -- of rumors that BlackBerry's gonna get bought."

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Apple's newest Beats Music strategy could include a widespread push to all iPhone users in March.

"I think it makes a lot of sense," Sean Udall, CIO of Quantum Trading Strategies and author of The TechStrat Report, told Benzinga. "This is no different from Apple pushing out their productivity suite of products."

Unfortunately, consumers might still have to pay a monthly service fee.

"I think freemium is a tough business," Brett Golden, president and co-founder of The Chart Lab, told Benzinga. "Eventually everybody drives the price down so much it's not even worth being in the business. It becomes such a commodity."

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Analysts had a lot to say about the European parliament's plans to break up Google.

"It just doesn't make sense to break Google into any pieces," Global Equities Research analyst Trip Chowdhry told Benzinga.

"As a matter of fact, the European [Parliament] should be rewarding Google for bringing innovation in multiple disciplines and democratizing the whole world."

Tigress Financial Partners analyst Ivan Feinseth doubts the break-up will ever occur.

"They’ve called for a lot of companies which had dominant positions for years to break up, and it’s never happened," Feinseth told Benzinga.

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"If Qualcomm can't do it, nobody can do it," Rob Enderle, principal analyst at Enderle Group, told Benzinga.

"They're pretty much a pure play networking company -- as close as we get in this market in terms of networking technology. And they're the most powerful."

Global Equities Research analyst Trip Chowdhry thinks Qualcomm could be successful but thinks the company must "go beyond [its] comfort zone."

"I believe it should be a complete solution," Chowdhry told Benzinga. "The world is going in that direction. If you think about, why is the cloud getting so popular? Because they can't own the complexity themselves.

"If you can bring the hardware [and] software into a solution that somebody can just take and put… into the cars, it will be a phenomenal success."

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To be clear, Google will still be available in Firefox as a selectable option. However, when users enter a search query without selecting a specific search engine, Firefox will automatically route users to Yahoo.

"It's a big loss for Google," Rob Enderle, principal analyst at Enderle Group, told Benzinga. "Well, not as big as it would have been a few years back. The Firefox browser has slipped an awful lot from their old highs. So it's not as big of a hit as it would have been four or five years ago."

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The preceding slideshow was just the beginning. Check out these other hot stories right here on Benzinga.

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