OPPO Find N Foldable Phone Review

With a foldable device, the specs sound like the most boring part. That said, the 2019 Motorola Razr proved that a good foldable could be crippled by middling performance. Fortunately, OPPO didn’t really skimp on the hardware, which makes its proposition even more of an unexpected surprise.

The Snapdragon 888 will be “previous-gen” in the next weeks, of course, but its performance is still commendable, especially when paired with 12GB of RAM. The rest of the OPPO Find N is your typical affair, which means that it runs buttery smooth for almost everything you can throw at it. It ranks quite along with other Snapdragon 888 phones and even beats the Exynos Galaxy S21 Ultra. Of course, there’s also a Pro Gamer mode to kick things up a notch at the cost of more heat and shorter battery life.

he OPPO Find N also has superb battery life compared to the Galaxy Z Fold 3. That’s thanks to the larger 4,500 mAh battery inside despite its smaller size. With average use, the phone lasts a day before requiring a charge, though continuous gaming and watching on the device will naturally drain it faster. Given how handy it is and how beautiful its screen is, you might indeed find yourself doing that a lot. Fortunately, OPPO ships a 33W SuperVOOC charger with the phone, so you can charge it from empty to full in just about 70 minutes.

The one rather disappointing aspect of the foldable phone when it comes to hardware is the sound system. There are only two speakers, and both of them are located at the bottom. This removes any opportunity for a good stereo sound implementation, which is a shame and a puzzle for a device that was designed with entertainment in mind. If that weren’t bad enough, the actual audio quality is pretty average, with the volume being its biggest strength, mostly thanks to having two speakers on the same side.

The OPPO Find N’s biggest draw isn’t its performance, though. After all, we’ve seen nearly the same specs on the Galaxy Z Fold 3, the Xiaomi Mi Mix Fold, and the Huawei Mate X2. What everyone is buzzing about OPPO’s foldable phone is, instead, is a radically different design. Yes, it still folds vertically in the middle like the three mentioned above, but it is significantly smaller and wider, which is actually the greatest thing about it.

Almost all foldable phones to date have failed to deliver a design that is usable when the phone is folded. All three before OPPO are too tall, with the Xiaomi Mi Mix Fold as the biggest offender. They are also too narrow, making content look cramped and making keyboards almost unusable. The OPPO Find N solves that by having an external screen in a handier 18:9 ratio and a smaller 5.5-inch screen, almost a throwback to smartphones predating “phablets.” This does mean that the phone opens to an almost square 8.4:9 aspect ratio, but the 7.1-inch screen also makes it as manageable as a small tablet.

The size problem isn’t the only thing that OPPO solved, though admittedly, it might be less original here. Taking a page from Huawei’s book, the Find N’s proprietary “Flexion Hinge” folds the middle of the screen into a teardrop shape that allows that area of the flexible display to sink into the frame when folded, which has two advantages that the more expensive Galaxy Z Fold series has failed to implement after three iterations. For one, the phone can fold completely flat without any gap in the middle, reducing the risk of having small particles enter through that gap. It also results in making the crease in the middle almost vanish completely. It’s still there, given certain angles and lighting conditions, but you’ll have to look for it harder than on the Galaxy Z Fold 3.

The OPPO Find N”s overall design results in a foldable phone that is finally less awkward to use, especially when folded. And just like all foldable phones this year, OPPO’s hinge allows it to stop at any angle, turning the phone into a makeshift laptop or stand for the main cameras. Granted, some might actually find the smaller phone more cramped when it comes to content, but that isn’t really the case once you start getting lost in watching videos or browsing the Web.

Sadly, the one thing that OPPO couldn’t surpass Samsung on is in the waterproofing department. Both the Find N and the Galaxy Z Fold 3 are weak against dust, but OPPO’s foldable phone has no IP rating either. Of course, the company assures us that the phone won’t die from your sweaty hands or even a few drops of rain, but forget about trying to use it under a downpour.

The internal flexible screen is a 7.1-inch AMOLED panel with a resolution of 1920×1792, barely reaching 2K requirements. It supports a variable refresh rate of up to 120Hz and can do both HDR10 and HDR10+. It has a small punch-hole cutout in the upper left corner for the front-facing camera, but it’s easy enough to forget it’s there in everyday use. There’s a thin protective layer on top of the main screen, and users should not remove that under any circumstance or risk destroying the foldable screen completely.

The external Cover Screen is also an AMOLED panel that measures 5.5 inches and has a resolution of 1972×988, sadly missing the cut for Full HD. Unfortunately, it only has a maximum refresh rate of 60Hz, which means that the change in smoothness when switching between the two screens can be a bit jarring. Of course, that still depends on what rate the internal screen is running at, which can be 60Hz anyway, depending on the app or content being displayed. If that really starts to irk you, there is always the option to lock the internal screen down to 60Hz.