I think a lot of the 'delay upon delay' stuff is coming from people talking to third party suppliers and retailers rather than Nokia directly. Perhaps that's where communication is falling down.

When I've spoken with Nokia UK directly, I was always told 'tentative november' until recently, when it became 'november'. Third party stores have often been working off of the press release I think, 'mid october', 'late october', 'late november', 'mid november' are all of the responses I've had from asking around, and from reading a lot of these threads, other people have had the same experience.

Nokia DE, from other threads, also seem to not have been singing off the same hymnsheet, as IIRC they were using similar responses to those noted above.

Just a summary from what I know, hopefully it's useful to you in some way.