Nokia's long-promised revival remains some way off, the Finnish mobile giant's launch hitting another to the renaissance of the gaming platform, which is set to boost mobile gaming and deliver interactive entertainment to a range of handsets.

The so-called N-Gage First Access Platform was set to arrive in November, we're told, but a pre-release version was delayed until December, and was only set to work with Nokia N81 and N81 8GB phones. Even this pre-release toe-dipping has been delayed, now, however, Nokia explaining the delay thusly:

"We know all of you are eager to get started with N-Gage First Access, and we are just as eager to get it into your hands and start hearing your feedback. We have teams of people around the world, literally, working overtime to deliver this experience to you," read a statement on the N-Gage blog.

"Unfortunately, as can sometimes happen in software development, unexpected difficulties can occur. We have been doing an internal run with more than 1,000 global testers this week, and during this process we uncovered an issue we feel we need to address.

"Overall, the games and service are working smoothly, but because of this issue, we feel we could not release N-Gage First Access before the holidays as planned."

Testing progresses, and Nokia are also promising more games at pre-launch as a result of this delay. We'll keep you posted.

By Luke Guttridge