The long wait isn’t over yet - new info says the Nokia N8 will start shipping in late September, at least for those who pre-ordered. In the mean time, the Nokia E7 popped up, reportedly going official as soon as next week.

The Nokia N8 has been on a handful of sites for pre-order, each site citing a different launch date. Some of those dates flew through with no N8 in sight, other dates are always a couple of weeks ahead.

The end just might be in sight though - a Finnish site spoke to Nokia’s Senior Communications Manager who said that Nokia N8 pre-orders will shipping September 30. He also said that the N8 will cost 499 euros - since we’ve seen different prices for different countries, that shipping date might be for Finland only.

Still, the Nokia World event is fast approaching (it’s on September 14 and 15) - there Nokia is expected to unveil the Nokia E7. The E7 is a Symbian^3 phone with a slide out QWERTY and got leaked a few times, with speculation that it’s the Nokia N9.

Nokia E7 photos

Well, it’s not the N9, but the specs still seem quite impressive - a 4″ touchscreen (probably nHD), 3G, Wi-Fi, 8MP camera with dual LED flash and an HDMI port. If these specs pan out, the Nokia E7 should sit somewhere between the Nokia C7 (which has a smaller screen and no QWERTY) and the Nokia N9 (which touts an aluminum body and MeeGo). The Nokia E7 specs are unconfirmed, but that should change next week.

Well, well - Nokia N900 got MeeGo after all. We’ll probably never see it as an official firmware, but as of today MeeGo 1.0 is available for download and it runs on N900 as well as Atom-based netbooks. The next update, v1.1, is already scheduled - in other words, MeeGo has landed.

So Nokia won’t release MeeGo on the Nokia N900 commercially. That’s sort of OK though, because there’s a pretty strong community around the Nxxx devices and they’ve ran weirder things on their beloved Internet tablet/phone devices like KDE (a desktop Linux shell).

The handset release of the MeeGo 1.0 platform is still more developer-oriented - developing the user experience will start in June. New releases are planned to come out every six months - so, you can expect MeeGo 1.1 in October.

MeeGo is also available for netbooks - non-touch for now, but v1.1 will bring touch support to the netbook version. There’s some pretty positive feedback in the MeeGo blog as far as the netbook version is concerned - will Chrome OS arrive late to the netbook/tablet OS party?

Anyway, here’s the download link for the Nokia N900 MeeGo OS. If you give it a go, leave us a comment with your impressions.