It really depends on what you want, what’s important to you, and what your budget is. My best friend is my wife, who is deeply invested in the Apple ecosystem, so an iPhone is most appropriate for her. I’m heavily invested in Ubuntu and like Google better than Apple, so the MyTouch is most appropriate for me.

Would you tell your best friend to buy it?

Taz

So far I am doing these things:

GPS w/ compass, altimiter, lat., long. etc.
Maps (google maps for now but I believe you can download maps too for no signal situaitons)
A guitar tuner
Audio recording (guitar sessions for example)
A guitar chord trainer
Streaming internet radio in the car – oh yeah
Media player – not just mp3 & whatever Apple uses but ogg too – my format of choice for small but good files
Web browser Opera – nice and fast
Wifi phone – you won’t use your minutes
Wifi analyzer
3.1 MP Camera/Camcorder
A level (yes as in leveling a picture)
Dictionary
Games
Terminal emulator (very handy @ work)
VNC client (work again)
Browsing networked drives on a Windows network

And all of this for free. :)

Honestly, the phone saw no action for the first 2 days there was so much else to see and do.

I do not care for Apple products personally but someone else’s choice is just that. You’ll have to really look deeply to see what functionality you need and what you can live without. iPhone is a one-app-at-a-time platform. Android is a multi-tasking platform. Soon I’ll be running Debian on the Mytouch. These are the things that matter to me, myself and I which is what I bought the pc/phone for. It most assuredly wasn’t to have the manufacturer actively attempt to break my phone with their firmware updates. ;)

So from someone who doesn’t own a smart phone, and isn’t likely to get one for his birthday, what is it about one of any make that makes ownership so great? Is it the fascination of a new toy, being able to impress your friends, or is there something that they do which makes your life significantly better? I would find the answers to those questions really helpful in any future reviews.

Not many people seem to care on how easy to unlock an iPhone is. Easy as in “insecure”. To me, swipping a finger left to right and having access to the data stored in a device like this is simply unacceptable (although I think there’s an option to use a numeric pad, too).

What really amazes me is how little people seem care about that.

Any touch screen phones are usually bad knock offs of the iPhone. This is simply because of cheapness of the cell phone business. The touch screens are never multi touch screens. Most of the touch screens need recalibration after a week or two of use, which is awful because I have a DS which never requires calibration.

The software on the MyTouch sounds like it definitely needs improvement. USB mount by phone software? Yuck.

One more thing: If you wanted an iPhone, why not virtualize Windows XP, install iTunes, and make a USB filter for your iPhone? It’s the way I do it with my iPod Touch. I put my iTunes music library in a shared folder between host and client so Banshee can play anything I purchased and so the VM hdd size does not balloon.
Genius? :)

The rest of the features you have mentioned are not of the myTouch but of the OS (Android) itself which also exists on the G1.

The N9xx series devices are likely to have a modernized version of that support (i.e. Flash 9 or 10) but it’s not a foregone conclusion, nor does it help anyone save those users unless they want to dabble with packaging up the piece parts and wedging them onto something they weren’t designed for.