In a latest update, the N-Gage team has announced the following:

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.

As we work on a solution, we will continue to polish the overall experience, ready more games for N-Gage First Access, carry on our extensive internal testing over the holidays, and prepare for the new year and the new wave of mobile play.

See N-Gage Blog for more

see also www.n-gage.com

Obviously this was a tough corporate call, however, indeed its best to delay a launch rather than releasing an application or service that isn't ready. 

PS: I'm still missing my old N-Gage classic game deck which was stolen (I have about 12 games gathering dust)... if you have one and want to part with it contact glenn at symbianone.com!