More often than not you’ll find people in this industry that label themselves as "fans" that are rooting for a particular platform that they have grown to love. Team Android, Team iPhone, Team Windows Phone, Team BlackBerry… everybody chooses a team. But for me? Well, I happen to like and dislike different parts of every platform equally. So would that make me…

#TeamiWinDroidBerry? #TeamWinBerryiDroid? We’ll stick with iWinDroidBerry, because I like winning and a “droid berry” sounds interesting. Or lethal. But we’ll go with interesting.

My first real smartphone platform that I experienced was Windows Mobile. To be honest, at this point I’ve had so many phones that I can’t remember which phone in particular was my first one, but I believe it all started with the HTC Touch Diamond. It was the slowest and most aggravating touch device I think I had ever owned, which is probably why I didn’t keep it for long. I soon traded it for an HTC Snap, which lasted for an even shorter amount of time because it gave me the same problems with less functionality. I finally ended up with a Palm Treo Pro, which I was actually favorable of but still encountered a lot of the same slow issues.

But the thing I enjoyed about Windows Mobile is that even though it was slow, and at times very frustrating to deal with, is that it was the platform that gave me my first taste of going beyond the basics to change what I wanted to change within the device: these were my first devices that I decided to root.

Now, I could go on for a long time about what it was like going through the rooting process, but since this article isn’t a children’s novel titled “My First Root” I will spare you the juicy details, but I’ll have you know that once I discovered how to root I was trying so many different ROMs that I lost sleep over it. But I had a blast figuring out the process and therefore I have very fond memories of Windows Mobile in the end.

I also saw Windows Mobile as a stepping stone to other platforms. When I first got Windows Mobile it was confusing as ever, but it was fun figuring out how to use it. My next step was moving on to a BlackBerry device. Nobody noticed you if you carried a Windows Mobile device, but you were one bad mama-jamma if you had a BlackBerry. I mean, hello… BBM, anybody?

I liked BlackBerry because it just worked better than Windows Mobile devices. The actions were smoother, and the candybar-style device with the  QWERTY keyboard was nice. BlackBerry seemed to have the bells and whistles that Windows Mobile didn’t, and it was a very reliable device that hardly ever gave me any problems – compared to Windows Mobile, anyway.  I could name a whole plethora of problems that I never knew I had, until after I discovered my next platform…

Which brings me to Android. Android was a platform I had discovered quite by accident, ironically. I was simply looking for a new phone with a new carrier and happened to fall in love with the first Galaxy S device, the Samsung Vibrant. I didn’t know what it was, or what it did, but it was lovely and I wanted it. So I got it, and I just loved it.

To make a long story short with Android, I loved it so much that every device from that point forward had to be Android. The Samsung Vibrant, the HTC MyTouch Slide 3G, the HTC EVO 4G, the HTC EVO 3D, the Samsung Galaxy S II… all of them were great for a period of time. And then, when I seemed to have finally become bored with Android altogether, the most unsuspecting device fell into my hands.

The iPhone. Now, the iPhone is a sore spot for me in some cases because the device originally released at some point during my high school career. If you had one, you were “ballin’”, as the kids like to say. You had swag if you had an iPhone – but not me. I didn’t have swag. So when I finally held the iPhone in my hands all those feelings of jealousy towards my classmates who had the iPhone yet probably had no idea what they were doing with it half the time came flooding back to me – but I was excited to see what the excitement was all about.

As it turns out the excitement that the kids in my school displayed was excitement for a different reason – at the time, the device was revolutionary. It was exciting to have the product because nobody else really had anything like it. Android was still very much in development and if you tried to argue that your G1 was better than an iPhone you probably got laughed at. Nice iOS knock-off, buddy. That platform isn’t going anywhere. In short, the iPhone was the most polished smartphone platform on the market – and many still argue that it still is.

But what made me excited wasn’t that it was revolutionary, because it wasn’t anymore. It didn’t do more things than Android did. It didn’t have the security of BlackBerry. I didn’t know how to jailbreak it like I knew how to root a Windows Mobile or Android device. But I never had any problems with it for the longest time. It never hiccupped when switching apps or flipping through screens and it had some of the coolest apps that I couldn’t find on the Android market. The operations of the device were easy and the whole layout was very simplistic. It was simply a nice platform. And that’s where the progression of my smartphone journey currently rests – on iOS.

So you see, throughout my whole smartphone discovery I’ve found positives and negatives to each platform. I even owned a couple of webOS devices in between there that I enjoyed for a  few months. I still haven’t owned a Windows Phone device, but even then I have researched it enough to find some things I like and some things I don’t like. In the end I don’t really favor one platform over the other all the time. It’s always changing. I mean, for a while there even BlackBerry caught my eye again simply by revamping everything and rolling out BlackBerry 10. Same goes for Windows Mobile and Windows Phone. You can never rule out the possibility that once something is outdated it won’t come back with a better form. (Except for webOS, you can pretty much rule that one out.) My point being that sometimes our opinions change from favoring one platform to another – for me that happens quite frequently. It would be pointless for me to pledge loyalty to one and then change my mind later. And while some might argue with you until kingdom come, t’s perfectly okay to like all of them.

It’s not like it’s illegal or anything.

Image via Hexus