Ring, ring!

Ring, ring!

Will somebody please answer that? It's Nokia (NYSE:NOK) back on the line, phoning in with Thursday's Q2 2007 earnings news. I know it's an early hour (6 a.m. Eastern), but at least the news shouldn't be as unpleasant as what Motorola (NYSE:MOT) delivered earlier this month.

After Nokia's news comes out, we'll have time aplenty to dissect it. But in these few hours before we begin obsessing over its short-term progress, let's take a moment to review what investors think about it as a long-term investment. Our tool in this endeavor: Motley Fool CAPS, where we poll more than 60,000 participants for their views on well over 4,000 companies, Nokia among them. Here's what Fools have to say about the company.

Up or down?
More than 700 players have submitted opinions on the company. The verdict: Nokia's in like Finn.

Eighty-nine percent of CAPS raters think it will outperform the market, and when you drill down to the opinions of our very best players -- the CAPS All-Stars -- that optimism ratio shoots up to an impressive 98%. This suffices to win the Finns four out of five possible CAPS stars.

And so, among major telecom equipment providers whose shares (or ADRs representing shares) trade in the U.S., Nokia climbs one slot from last quarter to tie Ericsson and Qualcomm (NASDAQ:QCOM) for first place:

Communication Equipment Makers

CAPS Rating (out of 5)

Ericsson

****

Nokia

****

Qualcomm

****

Motorola

**

JDS Uniphase (NASDAQ:JDSU)

**

Alcatel-Lucent

**

Ciena (NASDAQ:CIEN)

**

Wall Street vs. Main Street
Wall Street, too, has had a change of heart on Nokia. Among the 11 professional investors we track, buy sentiment outnumbers sell 10-to-1. I wonder if Nokia's 35-point outperformance of the S&P 500 over the last year has anything to do with that?

Bull pitch
Nokia bulls like the company's potential in a world where more and more people are earning enough to buy their first cell phones. Citing China, India, and Brazil as particularly attractive markets, and Nokia's status as the world market share leader, bulls think Nokia the "best positioned of any of the handset manufacturers to sell low tier phones to the emerging markets."

Bear pitch
Bears have changed their tune in recent months. When last we checked, they were worrying that Nokia would suffer the same fate that took down Motorola -- commoditized phones leading to shrinking profit margins. Lately, the fear has shifted to the bugbear-du-jour: Apple's (NASDAQ:AAPL) iPhone. One bear's entire anti-Nokia thesis consists of: "Apple's iphone will be a big threat for Nokia."

(Then again, according to fellow Fool Dave Mock, the initial results out of AT&T (NYSE:T) contained "iPhone stats [that] underwhelmed many onlookers.")

Look who's talking
To learn the identities of the wise Fools who penned these words, to examine their records (and see whether they know whereof they speak), and to explore the plethora of additional financial data we've put together on the company, just click here. It's all free.

Fool contributor Rich Smith does not own shares of any company named above. You can find him on CAPS, publicly pontificating under the handle TMFDitty, where he's currently ranked No. 1,012 out of more than 60,000 raters. The Fool has a disclosure policy.