Oppo’s first flip phone to sell outside its Chinese home market is the Find N2 Flip, an Android clamshell aimed squarely at challenging Samsung’s popular Z Flip 4.
The next-generation flipper costs £849 – less than Samsung’s by £50 – and uses a different type of hinge that aims to help solve one of the most obvious flaws with folding phones – the crease in the middle of the screen.
The metal and glass form is immediately familiar, with a glossy 6.8-inch display that looks like a regular phone when open. The flexible OLED screen still folds in half, but Oppo’s hinge design creates a “water drop” shape in the center instead of a smooth loop.
This allows the radius of the fold not to be too tight, creating less creases on the surface of the screen when it is unfolded. That’s not to say there isn’t a visible depression running right through the screen, but it’s shallower and less pronounced than other foldable phones.
The N2 Flip’s hinge feels solid when fully open and closes with a satisfying snap, but it offers less resistance and has a lot more play than Samsung’s foldable phones. You can keep the screen open between 45 and 110 degrees, but it wobbles while doing so.
The phone is only splash resistant, not submersible, as is the industry standard. Oppo doesn’t offer a formal dust resistance rating for the N2 Flip, but it has built multiple protections against dust on the back of the hinge. The phone is also rated to last over 400,000 folds, which is equivalent to over 100 openings and closings every day for 10 years.
Specifications
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Main screen: 6.8-inch FHD+ 120Hz AMOLED display (403 ppi)
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Cover screen: 3.3-inch AMOLED (250 ppi)
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Processor: MediaTek Dimension 9000+
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RAM: 8GB
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Storage: 256GB
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OS: ColorOS 13 based on Android 13
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Camera: 50MP+8MP rear, 32MP front
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Connectivity: 5G, nano sim + esim, wifi6, NFC, Bluetooth 5.3 and GNSS
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Waterproof: IPX4 splash
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folded dimensions: 85.5 x 75.2 x 16mm
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Unfolded Dimensions: 166.2 x 75.2 x 7.5mm
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Weight: 191g
Good battery and reasonable performance.
Unusually for an Android phone of this price, the N2 Flip has a MediaTek Dimensity 9000+ chip, rather than one from Qualcomm. On paper, it’s slower than rival chips of the past two years, but overall it performed well, felt snappy, and handled tasks well, with a bit of a stutter here and there in some graphics-intensive games.
Battery life is very good for a foldable phone, typically lasting up to two days between charges when used primarily on Wi-Fi with the main screen on for about five hours plus a couple of hours on 5G while out and about. Longer stretches on 5G in congested areas dropped battery life by about half a day, but that’s still much longer than the Samsung Z Flip 4, which only lasts 31 hours under similar conditions.
Sustainability
Oppo rates batteries to maintain at least 80% of original capacity for at least 800 full charge cycles.
The phone is usually repairable by Oppo in the United Kingdomwith a replacement battery is £72. the company operates an exchange scheme and publishes annually sustainability reports, but not for individual products. Find N2 Flip does not include recycled materials.
Color OS 13
Oppo’s ColorOS is a heavily customized version of Android 13, with a colorful design and features that are more familiar in Asia than most Android phones sold in the West.
It works well, but it lacks brightness. Small bugs are visible throughout the interface, such as asking for a “password” on the lock screen when you’re actually asking for a passcode with the numpad, and what appear to be slightly different translations from Chinese to English throughout. . These are drawbacks, but they shouldn’t exist in a phone this price from a manufacturer as big as Oppo.
More annoyingly, you can’t quickly open the camera with a double-press of the power button like you can on western Android phones, including the Oppo OnePlus sub-brand; you have to resort to double-pressing one of the volume buttons, which doesn’t work if the screen is on or if there’s music playing.
While the Cover screen generally works fine, the screen is almost always upside down when you fold the phone or pick it up off a desk, requiring about a second to rotate when you pick it up.
Oppo will provide four years of Android updates and five years of security updates from launch, similar to Samsung and Google’s policies, but delaying Apple’s more than six years of support.
Camera
The N2 Flip has a 50MP 8MP ultra-wide main camera on the outside and a 32MP in-display camera on the inside.
The main camera is quite good, taking generally well-detailed and correctly exposed images in good to medium light, but photos can look a bit gray at dimmer settings. Low-light performance is reasonable, as are portrait shots, but there’s no macro mode available.
However, the ultra-wide camera is lacking, producing dark and gray shots, something you’d use only in bright conditions.
The 32 MP selfie camera is pretty good, but you also have the option to shoot with the main camera with the phone closed, which works well.
Overall, the N2 Flip’s cameras aren’t anything to write home about, trailing most high-end competitors at this price point, but perfectly fine for general snapshots.
Price
The Oppo Find N2 Flip costs £849 and will ship on March 2 in black or purple.
For comparison, Samsung’s Z Flip 4 costs £899the Oppo Find X5 Pro costs £799and the costs of OnePlus 11 £729.
Verdict
The Oppo Find N2 Flip has shown that good foldable phones are not just the domain of market leader Samsung and can be made at closer to mainstream prices.
The N2 Flip excels at putting a big screen in your pocket in a compact folding package. It looks and feels good, keeping all the newness of the foldable phone, but improves on previous designs, with its teardrop-shaped hinge that reduces crease on the screen. It lasts much longer than other battery-powered flip phones and feels snappy in everyday use.
The large deck screen on the outside is useful, but it feels underused, with limits to what you can do with it. The overall software also needs polishing for this premium price. The camera is fine, but it’s not quite up to the standard you’d find on similarly priced phones. There is certainly room for improvement.
Oppo rates the screen and hinge for 400,000 folds, which should mean it lasts for the life of the phone. But as this is the company’s first foldable device to launch outside of China, it still doesn’t have the same durability record Samsung has built on for the past four years.
I’m cautiously optimistic, but this is still new technology and more fragile than a traditional phone that needs to be treated with care. Buying insurance might be a good idea.
Advantages: great big screen that folds in half, teardrop hinge reduces visibility of creases, big clamshell screen, good battery life, dual-nano sim and esim, drives price down competitors.
Cons: less durable than a regular phone, only splash resistant, no dust resistance rating, average cameras and no optical zoom, software needs polishing, not the fastest phone.
