Rafe's Flickr Archive

This Data Lifeboat was created by Rafe Blandford on 28 April 2026.

Why are you making this particular Data Lifeboat?
This collection documents the rise and fall of Symbian — the smartphone operating system that predated iOS and Android — through photographs taken during a decade of covering the mobile industry as founder and editor of All About Symbian (allaboutsymbian.com, 2005–2014) and later All About Windows Phone (allaboutwindowsphone.com, 2011–2017).

The images include hands-on photography of Nokia and other Symbian devices, coverage from industry events such as Mobile World Congress and Nokia World, and documentation of the hardware and software that defined early smartphone culture before the iPhone reshaped the market. At its peak, All About Symbian reached over a million readers monthly and published nearly 25,000 articles across its family of sites.

These photographs have historical value as primary source material from a pivotal period in consumer technology. Symbian powered the majority of the world's smartphones from the early 2000s until approximately 2012, yet visual documentation of the platform, its devices, and the events surrounding its development is increasingly scarce online. This archive preserves that record, along with whatever metadata, tags, and community context Flickr captured at the time.

The collection was originally hosted on Flickr as a working photo library supporting the publications. It is archived here to ensure its long-term preservation independent of any single platform.

What's important to you about these photos?
This is also a portion of my digital photographs - pre-dating automatic upload to the cloud, so they are more curated that the mass collections of today. They also include a large number of Symbian device albums (from launch events and reviews), which catalogue some of the early smartphone era.

What is it for?
This Data Lifeboat was built for personal and archiving use.

Places taken

© OpenStreetMap contributors

1.8% of the photos in this Data Lifeboat have locations.