Fairphone 6 is switching to a new design that's even more sustainable

All phones eventually become obsolete, but their guts could be used in so many ways. I'd love for example if someone made an enclosure acting also as multi port docking station so that old phones with unlocked bootloader (Fairphone being one of them) could be reflashed with a different operating system then used as mini PCs, media players, IoT wall terminals with bigger screens or other uses. Seeing all that perfectly good electronics going into landfills because planned obsolescence says so just irritates me. Can we do that at least for unlocked ones? Framework did something similar for their laptop mainboards, minus the docking station.function as they already have more ports than a phone. Any chances that this could be doable with Fairphone hardware?

For what you say, the most important is that the USB Type C connector of the phone must not be an antediluvian USB 2.0, but it must be an USB 3.0 or better, and also supporting DisplayPort.

For such phones, using any kind of peripherals, including external monitors, network interfaces or docking stations becomes possible.

There are relatively cheap smartphones with such USB ports, e.g. around $400 from Motorola, but the majority of the smartphones, including many of the most expensive, for which such limitations are inexcusable, are limited to a USB 2.0 interface, which is almost useless today.

While this Fairphone seems to have good specifications otherwise, there is no word about its USB Type C connector.

I am no longer willing to ever spend money on a smartphone that does not support at least USB 3.0 and DisplayPort.

EDIT:

Looking now on Gsmarena at Fairphone 5, I see that it had an adequate USB 3.0/DisplayPort. I have not noticed this before, because when searching for possible upgrades I was not looking to smartphones with CPUs as ancient as those of Fairphone 5.

Hopefully Fairphone 6 will retain the USB interface of its predecessor. This, coupled with a relatively up-to-date mid-range Qualcomm SoC and with a reasonable price for what it offers, can make it an interesting choice.