i live in the uk and am after a brand new n9. i can get one for a good price from germany when i visit there next week. my questions and sorry if these are silly questions but

1 - are the specs the same for the n9 whichever country it is bought in?
2 - is it just a case of selecting 'english' as the language at start up so i have an english phone or will i need to download additional s/ware?

you can set language and regional format, so you will have an english phone.

between Germany and the UK you should be fine by simply selecting the language (UK English)
the phone will set itself to UK.
don't have a N9, but talking from experience with many NOKIA mobiles, from 7110 to N8 and N900.

btw. there is a two week old & unused black N9 64GB that was offered here a few days ago...
[Selling] New Nokia N9 64GB (Black)

Any chance of sharing the price?

And you will have no problems with English language selection - mine was originally a Switzerland version but had English option pre-installed.

And I'd advise you to steer clear of buying anything that would be mailed from outside the EU - import duty and Royal Mail 'extras' will make your bargain-buy much less of a bargain-buy.

And I see you're also after a silver N8 too.....

well my n9 arrived but after a few days playing and quite a bit regret i'm returning for a refund. main reasons

- found the display font across many areas just that little bit too small
- random lock ups on maps and camera
- after turning auto-brightness off using qtweak, the device locked on 'vivid' colour display (even though i had it set on 'normal') and would not revert to any the other 2 options
- battery 'watching' and being careful not to run too many things which drain the battery kinda defeats the object of having all those applications/settings on the phone in the first place. yes that is the smartphone/battery trade off but i have used other smartphones with better results

apart from that loved the hardware swiping and other aspects of the os but the points above really decided it for me

you should have given it some time, installing tweak apps I alway find a bit risky! maybe after a few weeks with the phone! did you do all the updates etc!

There are only a few minor bugs these days and firmware revisions have been good so far! sounds like your main concerns were software related?

the main issue is size of font. i increased it using qtweak for sms but even that only increased the font in the message bubbles. when writing a text it was still the small font also things like the feed font was too small. facebook/twitter font too small, email without having to zoom in etc

it is important to me that i can get the size of fonts across the board just the way i want them. only a couple of phones have been able to do that.

Windows phone has huge fonts lol

was really gutted having to return the phone. oh to be younger when my eye sight was better nevermind, i'll stick with my 9900