Agreed. I think we all have a few phones stashed away. This makes them immediately useful. I would love for this trend to continue in more companies. So much working hardware is tossed away needlessly.

It's also smart for Samsung. It encourages a secondary market for their old phones, increasing prices, and nudging their customers to "turn over" to a newer phone with the higher resell value.

This made me excited to see as well. Here's some more information for others that may be interested.

https://youtu.be/J1bK3TxdMeI

Skip to 9 minutes for a more fluent english speaker that I found much easier to follow. He mentions wiping Android, installing some base OS and using Docker at 12:25 in the video.

The website http://upcycling.io/

This is a great idea from Samsung. A phone has everything needed to become a useful IoT device.

But how would I connect sensors and other things to the phone?

USB-OTG?

reminds me of the os project .. https://duckduckgo.com/?q=postmarketos&t=ffsb&ia=web

Postmarket OS seems very useful. Would be great if Samsung provides resources to this already existing project instead of starting their own. For example Samsung could help port more Samsung devices to Post market OS and help with drivers (for example, looking at supported devices, I see audio is missing).