Nokia announced that Nokia N81 users would get a pre-release preview of the new Nokia N-Gage (called the Nokia N-Gage First Access) before Christmas. Unfortunately, things didn’t go as planned. According to 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.