Thanks for the reply! Two reasons: 1) I won't be in Europe until this fall (N9 will probably not be available anymore by then) and shipping the phone from Europe to the US is expensive and problematic, due to customs, etc. 2) Most EU shops are more expensive than the US shops. So if price was not a factor, I would ask someone to buy it directly from Nokia and send it to me to the US (or I could also fly back for a weekend ), but this way I would end up paying $800+ for the N9, which I could get here for around $500 or even less.