After Honor Magic V3 foldable phone caught the eye last year for its exceptionally svelte design and performance, fellow Chinese phone maker Oppo has responded with its own ultra-thin foldable phone that sports a impressively slim profile – the Find N5.
The new phone measures 8.93mm when folded and 4.21 mm when unfolded. That’s just a sliver thinner than the Magic V3’s 9.2 mm, making it the world’s thinnest foldable phone to date.
The Oppo phone’s svelte body is held together by a titanium alloy hinge, which enables the phone cover to be set at various angles without clamping shut. Opening the foldable screen does not take much effort either, and a bit of resistance gives the phone the impression of a well-engineered device.
The Honor Magic V3 foldable’s rounded edges feel thinner in the hands. That said, users who love a better grip will appreciate the squared edges of the Oppo phone more, especially when using it as a tablet.
The new phone’s matt glass back is comfortable to hold, providing a bit of friction for the hands to grip. The misty white design on the back makes it harder for fingerprints to be seen. However, I still prefer a leather back, which is a better match for this phone’s premium feel.
Weighing 229 grams, the Oppo Find N5 offers a lightweight experience without compromising on durability. The device boasts a 6.62-inch external OLED display and an 8.12-inch internal OLED screen, both supporting a 120Hz refresh rate for smooth visuals and 1400 nits brightness for outdoor use.
You might think that a foldable screen may not be water resistant, due to the gaps it creates. The Oppo Find N5 has another surprise: It has achieved IPX6, IPX8, and IPX9 water resistance certification, so it can be submerged in water and survive high-pressure water jets, making it hardy enough to bring along for outdoor trips.
The screen crease is not noticeable most of the time – well, unless you put it against a strong light source at an angle. More importantly, the crease doesn’t feel that obvious when your finger runs across the phone’s spine, and it is not as pronounced as on other foldables I have tried.
Underneath the Find N5’s screen, the new foldable is powered by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Elite processor. This is paired with 16GB of RAM and 512GB of internal storage, ensuring robust performance for multitasking and demanding applications.
The device houses a substantial 5,600mAh silicon-carbon battery, which provides impressive battery life, often lasting up to two days on a single charge.
Additionally, it supports a 80W wired charger, which comes with the phone. It also supports 50W wireless fast charging, though you have to buy the official wireless charger separately to get that convenience.
What about the interface? Notably, there are new productivity tools in the Oppo Find N5 that Mac or Apple users will like. For example, Oppo O+ Connect for Mac and iOS devices helps users manage the content in the Find N5 on their Apple devices.
After installing the O+ Connect for Mac app on their Mac desktop or “iDevices”, users can easily transfer content from the phone to a desktop or iPad. You can also directly control your Mac from the phone when out and about too.
The new Oppo phone’s camera system features a triple-lens setup: a 50-megapixel 1/1.56-inch main sensor, a 50-megapixel periscope telephoto lens with a 1/2.75-inch sensor, and an 8-megapixel ultrawide lens.
The camera system is quite capable in most shooting scenarios, but the 8-megapixel ultrawide camera is its Achilles heel. When shooting wide shots of interiors and landscapes, details are not as good as those found on the flagship Oppo Find X8 Pro. It’s true, having a foldable mechanism in a flat body means compromising some of the camera’s capabilities.
To be fair, the Oppo Find N5’s cameras are great for most uses unless you want the best smartphone camera system and find the big foldable screen unnecessary. In that case, the Oppo Find X8 Pro or the Honor Magic 6 Pro are better alternatives.
Of course, you can’t launch a new phone without showing off some AI smarts these days. Here, the Oppo Find N5 incorporates some useful AI functions that make a difference for everyday usage.
One of them is AI Document, which can translate, summarise, or improve documents you create or receive. There is also AI Call Summary, where the smartphone listens to your conversations and transcribes them into a text summary.
For me, the most useful is the Translate App. It uses both the outer and inner screens of the foldable phone to project the translated language to both parties in a conversation in real time, making it easy to conduct discussions.
To sum things up, the new Oppo foldable’s slim design wows with its looks but does not compromise much on functionality. It offers a comfortable grip and a premium feel as well, which will convince folks to part with a princely S$2,499 for the phone.
That said, the Find N5’s camera performance is still not at the level of Oppo’s other flagship phone, the Oppo Find X8 Pro, which excels in mobile imaging. Nothing’s perfect but if you want the slimmest foldable phone now and a suite of useful features, then you have to check out the Find N5.
