COREY TECH
After years of development and teasers, Oppo has just launched its first commercial foldable smartphone — the Oppo Find N. Unlike rival foldable products, Oppo has opted for a much more compact sub-6-inch closed size, but has it finally nailed the perfect flexible form factor?
Here, I want to talk about my first impressions of Oppo’s new foldable after spending a few hours with it. As a side note, this is also my first hands-on experience with any foldable smartphone. I’d like to think of myself as unjaded by the teething pains of early prototypes and I have high hopes that this phone feels like a finished product.
Oppo has worked on six generations of foldable smartphones over the past four years but this is the first to make it past the prototype state. The company states that it didn’t feel these products were quite ready for mass-market as the timing and tech weren’t quite right. Well, that extra time has clearly been well spent — the Find N is immaculately designed and feels every bit a phone built for daily use.
There’s a metal frame running around both the display and the camera housing, accompanied by a plush soft anti-fingerprint back. It’s incredibly stylish for a smartphone, let alone a foldable. This definitely isn’t a prototype, at least aesthetically. My only gripe about the design is the inner bezels are a little thick and cheaper-looking than the outside of the phone.
Importantly, for a foldable, the hinge feels robust. Oppo sent its hinge for assessment with TÜV which says it’s built to last at least 200,000 folds. That’s enough to open and close the display more than 100 times a day, every day for the next five years. There’s a wide metal spine that’s the correct width to avoid adding a gap between the displays when closed. Everything is nice and flush with no obvious gaps for dirt and dust to find their way in on the display side. Although there is a small gap between the spine and panels to allow for movement. Unlike the Galaxy Z Fold 3, however, there’s no official water resistance on offer, though Oppo has suggested it’ll survive splashes of water.
The front and back panels of the phone wrap around this center spine with a satisfying snap when fully open. There’s a slight spring-loaded action when the display is almost fully open, which is a bit of a nuisance if you don’t want the phone quite fully open. Although the display will hold its position firmly between 50-120 degrees. I don’t recommend using the phone in a folded fashion though, as the display takes on a notable tint that impacts visibility
Now about that display. The 7.1-inch 120Hz LPTO inner panel looks fantastic. There’s plenty of screen real estate for running two apps side by side or when using the floating window. Upon closing, you can see that the display crinkles slightly in two places rather than one due to the hinge design. While there’s no obvious crease right now, it’ll be interesting to observe how this design holds up over many weeks and months of continuous use.The 5.48-inch 60Hz outer display is definitely not as swanky as the inner panel but it’s perfectly serviceable and far more traditional than, say, the Galaxy Z Fold 3’s awkwardly tall and thin front-facing display.
I actually wasn’t convinced about the phone’s small size at first. Having become accustomed to 6.5-inch panels, it’s not a display I’d personally want to spend much time browsing the web on. But that’s what the inner panel is for. The Oppo Find N’s compact front display is perfect for checking email and sending messages, exactly the sort of thing you’ll need the phone to do when you quickly pull it out of your pocket.
Overall, I’m impressed with the built quality and design of the Oppo Find N. It’s every bit as good in the hand as the many, many other premium smartphones I’ve used this year.I’m still experimenting with the Find N’s software but I’m not quite convinced Oppo has nailed this part of the formula quite as well. It doesn’t help that some features and apps haven’t been translated from Chinese, although this is the launch market so we’ll overlook that for now.
The Oppo Find N runs a standard version of Color OS 11 (based on Android 11) with a few foldable-specific tweaks. The most useful is Dual Window, which splits the display in half to use two apps side by side with a simple dual-finger swipe down the middle of the screen. This works very well and although there’s a slight delay when entering this mode performance feels solid. App support is mostly very good, although a few of Oppo’s own apps, such as the camera and phone app, don’t work with this feature. You also can’t position the windows on top of one another when turning the display, which would be a nice feature for watching video and doing something else at once.
#oppo #oppofindN #foldable
00:00 – intro
01:16 – Oppo Find N: From prototype to prime time
05:16 – Software for a new form factor
08:41 – Oppo Find N: First impressions
10:19 – Thanks for watching guys!