NEW YORK (CNN/Money) - Nokia used to be known as a company investors could depend on in the cell phone business while Motorola was the "serial warner", the firm that always disappointed.

Those roles have been reversed. Nokia, the market leader, issued a shocking first-quarter warning last week, saying that its unit growth was lower than the overall industry's.

The Finnish phone phenom followed up that bombshell with another one Friday, indicating that second-quarter earnings also would be lower than expected.

But Motorola, the No. 2 player in cell phones, has been enjoying a wave of good news. The company reported better than expected fourth quarter sales growth in January and analysts expect Motorola to post an 11 percent increase in sales in the first quarter. Motorola will release those results Tuesday.

Ed Zander, Motorola's widely respected new chairman and CEO, has pledged to end Motorola's string of broken promises and product execution mishaps.

Zander has said the company will finally get its much-delayed V600 camera phone on the U.S. market by the second quarter. That would be a big plus for Motorola since camera phones are one of the hottest selling items in the consumer electronics world.

The changing tides is evident in the stock performance of both companies. Nokia is down 11 percent year-to-date, with an a plunge of nearly 8 percent on Friday morning alone.

Shares of Motorola, on the other hand, are up nearly 20 percent this year.

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Albert Lin, an analyst with American Technology Research, says Nokia's biggest problem is that it does not have enough higher-end phones on the market at a time when many consumers are looking to upgrade.

Making matters worse, Nokia's major competitors do have such products available and are able to take advantage of Nokia's stumble.

"This is the first time that all of the major cell phone players are strong," Lin said. "Nokia has always been able to point to one of its top competitors as being hobbled or crippled but that's not true right now."

In addition to Motorola, Samsung appears to be doing extremely well. The Korean tech company, which is the world's third largest cell phone producer, reported record profits Friday. Smaller rivals such as Germany's Siemens, Korea's LG Electronics and Sony Ericsson are also becoming tougher competitors.

Still, Lin thinks that Nokia will get back on track in the second half of the year once it has a more favorable product mix. As such, he said shares of look attractive.

As a result of Friday's tumble, the stock trades at only about 14.5 times 2004 earnings estimates. He likes Motorola as well but said that there is more risk there since the market is still waiting for evidence of a sustainable recovery.

"I would much rather buy Nokia on weakness than chase short-term strength," Lin said. "The market is anticipating further weakness and disaster but I don't think that's the case."

However, Casey Ryan, an analyst with Wells Fargo Securities was not so willing to dismiss Nokia's problems as temporary. With that in mind, he added that Nokia deserves to be trading at a much lower multiple than competitors.

"The numbers are absolutely terrible," Ryan said. "Nokia's clearly not a growth stock."

And other analysts are not convinced that Nokia's bad news is necessarily good news for Motorola.

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Ping Zhao, an equity analyst with Creditsights, said that Nokia's troubles could be a bad sign for all competitors in the short-term. That's because she said Nokia is apparently willing to cut prices aggressively to recover some of the share it lost.

"Nokia looks like they will do everything they can on the pricing side to get market share back and that's not a good sign for anybody," said Zhao.

Longer-term, she said Nokia may continue to struggle in Europe even after it unveils new products but thinks that the biggest beneficiaries will be Samsung, Siemens and LG.

And looking specifically at the U.S., Michael Davies, an analyst with Investec, said a big problem for both Nokia and Motorola is that the nation's largest wireless carrier, Verizon Wireless, is heavily promoting phones from Samsung and LG. "The Korean manufacturers have accelerated their growth in the U.S.," he said.

So it may be true that Nokia's travails will help the competition. But investors might be wrong to think that Motorola is the company that will gain the most ground.

Analysts quoted in this story do not owns shares of the companies mentioned and their firms have no investment banking ties to the companies.