After a long five-month wait, Nokia, the world’s largest producer of mobile phones, has finally begun shipping its much-anticipated N8 handset to customers. Nokia said deliveries would begin immediately for pre-orders of the touchscreen model, which had received “the highest amount of consumer pre-orders in Nokia history,” according to the company. Worldwide availability would be “in the coming weeks” and will vary by country, Nokia said.

The device was announced in April, and scheduled for release on Oct. 1, but was delayed as a result of a few lingering software bugs in the final build. The N8 relies on the latest version of the Symbian operating system and ushers the Finnish giant into the age of touchscreens, photos and web pages, as well as ‘rubberbanding’ menus (which bound when you reach the bottom or the top), and wildly popular apps.

In fact, by coming integrated with Qt, a software development environment, Nokia offers developers a new platform to build innovative apps on. Nokia has also made the Nokia Qt SDK available, in its initial beta, to let developers start realizing the potential of Qt.

Hoping to compete neck-and-neck with Apple’s iPhone, the N8 features a 3.5-inch, 640-by-360-pixel, multitouch-enabled display; a Carl Zeiss optics-enhanced 12MP camera with a flash, auto-focus and HD video recording; and a 680MHz ARM11 processor. Measuring just a half-inch thick, the N8 is powered by Symbian^3, and is intended to rival the multimedia capabilities of compact digital cameras by allowing users to make HD-quality videos and edit them with a built-in editing suite.

Perhaps a sign of its eagerness to trounce North American competitors, in early September, Nokia replaced its Finnish CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo with Microsoft executive Stephen Elop, a Canadian, marking the first time the company handed over the reins to a non-Finn.