It's totally legitimate for Nokia to limit the retailers on when they can start selling. They make the phone and they can decide who sells it and when.

The problem is that they are hiding this from the consumers. That's bad faith, because consumers that ordered from retailers have no idea when they will get their phones (which may be as early as next week or as late as February), so they just go over to Nokia and pay more, when they probably would have waited another week if they knew that's all they had to wait.

In this age of internet and message boards, this kind of practice is getting more and more dangerous and can backfire very easily. I wonder if Nokia sales people are thinking about this.