OPPO’s foldable phone is finally official, and it is a tantalising piece of work. If you find the Galaxy Z Fold3 too big, and the Galaxy Z Flip3 too small, OPPO Find N is exactly what the doctor ordered.
It is compact, without being too small, and has a few neat tricks that some of the competition do not offer up its sleeve.
For one, the hinge design that OPPO went with leaves no gap between the two halves when closed up. The halves close properly. Can we describe this as the perfect hinge? Perhaps. And it does more still.
Another thing the hinge is capable of is hold the two halves open in any position from angles of 50º to 120º, so you can use the phone in laptop-style mode, or even for long video calls or video consumption. Just prop it open on the table open and it stays up. Like this:
Being able to keep it open in this way makes the Find N the perfect replacement for old-school Communicator devices that we loved back in the days of hardware QWERTY keyboards.
Key specs of OPPO Find N foldable phone
The external display is a compact 5.49-inch AMOLED panel. This allows for easy one-handed use of the phone in closed form. There is a 32-megapixel front camera here for your quick selfies.
At the back is a triple camera setup comprising of a 50 MP Sony IMX766 sensor, a 16 MP ultra wide Sony IMX481 lens, and a 13 MP telephoto lens. It is good to see a telephoto lens in there.
When you open up the Find N, what you get is a 7.1-inch 120 Hz refresh rate, AMOLED display. That’s tablet territory size. So, you can switch between a compact phone and a tablet size. That sounds just perfect. The sweet spot of convergence. This is how I want a foldable phone to work.
OPPO says the foldable screen has been tested and TUV-verified to have “next to no crease” after 200,000 foldings. That sounds reassuring. Time will tell how it holds up.
Under the hood, the powerhouse is a Qualcomm Snapdragon 888 chipset. There are two memory variants – one with 8 GB RAM and 256 GB storage, and the other with 12 GB RAM and 512 GB storage. These are top-dog configurations and we expect nothing less than sterling performance.
Samsung’s foldable gadgets have not been encouraging in terms of battery capacity and battery life. The specs of the Find N looks like that was a key consideration in the design. Where the smaller Flip3, for example, sports a relatively measly 3300 mAh battery, and the bigger Fold3 features a 4400 mAh unit, what we have here in the Find N is a 4500 mAh unit, and it is coupled with 33W fast charging. It looks really good on paper, in comparison, but we will have to wait for the reviews to roll in to confirm how that works out in use.
OPPO’s implementation of foldable technology is commendable and sexy. OPPO says the Find N will be available in China from December 23, 2021. We can only hope that availability will not be limited to that single country and that OPPO will bless us in the rest of the world with this delightful piece of work.
It would be sinful to keep this gadget away from us. Don’t do it, OPPO. Don’t. This is almost the perfect foldable phone and deserves love worldwide.
For reference purposes, the Find N’s price tags translate to approximately US$1,200 for the 8GB/256GB variant and US$1,410 for the 12GB/512GB variant.
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