Forbes Innovation Consumer Tech Oppo Find N2 Flip Review: This Is How The Future Folds Ewan Spence Senior Contributor Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own. Storyteller exploring digital worlds, mobile, music and podcasting Following Feb 26, 2023, 05:41pm EST | Press play to listen to this article! Got it! Share to Facebook Share to Twitter Share to Linkedin Oppo has always been a strong name in the Chinese market but has remained a much smaller player in the international space. With the launch of the Oppo Find N2 Flip , the Chinese-based manufacturer is hoping to raise that profile. The Find N2 Flip shows off Oppo’s technical ability, is the first real challenger to Samsung’s Galaxy Z Flip series, and will introduce the Oppo brand to consumers across Europe and beyond. I’ve spent time with Oppo’s folding phone to find out if it meets those challenges. Oppo Find N2 Flip Ewan Spence Having spoken to Oppo VP’s Billy Zhang , one of the design goals of the Find N2 Flip is to have as normal a smartphone experience when the phone is open. In essence, there’s no point in having a folding flip phone that doesn’t work as a regular phone. Before all the bells, whistles, and technological advances, does the N2 Flip work as a standard smartphone? You’ll be relieved to hear that the answer is yes; Oppo has delivered a phone that offers a great experience. It’s not a flagship killer in specs, and there are two areas that you need to be careful of, but in general, the Find N2 Flip is a competent smartphone. Oppo Find N2 Flip Ewan Spence Right then, a whistle-stop tour of the Find N2 without thinking of the ‘Flip’. First up is the camera. The main camera comes with two lenses, a 50-megapixel main camera and an 8-megapixel ultrawide camera (and a 32-megapixel selfie camera mounted on a central punchily behind the screen). MORE FOR YOU Meet The Unknown Immigrant Billionaire Betting Her Fortune To Take On Musk In Space ‘Phygital’ Retail and The Store’s New Brand Ambassador A Texas Family Farm And Restaurant Becomes A Sustainable Culinary Oasis There’s nothing stunning in the pictures taken - these aren’t flagship-level lenses and sensors, yet the automatic calibrations for the full auto mode, the post-processing of the image, and various options between those points offer solid images in good- to medium- light. Compared to the flagships, there’s a notable drop in low-light performance. Shapes are picked out, but colors are not as strong. Specs-wise, Oppo has passed over the Qualcomm SnapDragon series of system on chips, instead going with MediaTek’s Dimensity 9000+. This is broadly similar to the SnapDragon 8 Gen 1, so day-to-day use is going to see very little difference. Developers, especially of graphically intensive games and apps, are more familiar with the ins and outs of the SnapDragon system, so there’s a little bit less optimization on gaming. Of course, if you’re looking for hardcore gaming, there are more specialist phones. For your 2D puzzlers and platforms, the MediaTek option is going to work just as well as the Qualcomm option. Oppo Find N2 Flip Ewan Spence Oppo’s flavor of Android is ColorOS. It’s well-established in the Chinese market and follows many of the UI trends favored there. That means you have a lot more vibrancy and color throughout the interface, and some of the more western established shortcuts (such as a double-tap on the power key to open the camera) are missing. How much localization a UI should need is a curious debate, but one area of localization still needs a bit of work, and that’s the translation. There are areas where the choice of phrases and wording feels a little bit… mechanical - as if the translation was done by algorithm and not by hand. This doesn’t disrupt any functionality, but it does catch my eye. Support-wise; Oppo will offer four years of Android updates and a further year of security updates, matching that of the high-end Galaxy and Pixel handsets. If you’re looking for a more in-depth look at ColorOS, you can read my review here on Forbes . Oppo Find N2 Flip Ewan Spence Back to those two areas of note. The first is the screen’s aspect ratio. At 21:9, you might find that the phone is a little taller and narrower than other comparable rigid smartphones. It’s a small thing, and Android’s predisposition to go for apps with a ribbon on information will actually reduce the scrolling. I found it a touch restrictive in terms of the amount of information on-screen - word wrap has to be a bit more aggressive or the font size needs to be dropped - but it’s something that required a little bit of adjustment. Oppo does get bonus points for having a consistent bezel size around the whole screen and offering it with a 120 Hz fast refresh. The second area is, of course, the hinge. Rather than a U-shaped curve in competing flip phones, Oppo has gone with a teardrop-shaped curve. This in turn, leads to both a narrower area that is creased but also reduces the amount of curve over specific parts of the screen. Both of these help in reducing the visibility of the curve. Android’s Dark Mode is the quiet savior here. Switch to as much black as possible, and the hinge becomes almost imperceptible to the eye. Switch to white, and it’s a touch more visible, especially when scrolling. While it’s not invisible, it’s far enough in the background not to draw attention. You are going to feel it under your finger or thumb as you scroll through. With the current hinge technology, that’s a given. The hinge holds itself open after about 45 degrees of travel away from the flat, so you can have a nice angle for a video call. Oppo’s camera software also allows you to move the photo preview to either the top or bottom half of the screen, and the ‘camcorder’ mode for video is a delightful throwback. Oppo Find N2 Flip Ewan Spence Oppo, just like many other folding smartphone manufacturers, has decided to add an external display that allows users to see their notifications and do some quick triage on them, all without opening up the phone/ The Find N2 Flip’s solution is the cover screen - a 3. 5 The main screen of the cover allows you to see your notifications (just swipe up) and your quick toggle controls (just swipe down). In practice, I found little use for the latter. The former was more useful, allowing the sort of quick glance you see on the standby screen of a fixed phone. That’s mission accomplished in that sense. With the main camera lenses sitting next to the cover screen, you’ll be glad to know that you can use the N2 Flip when closed as a selfie cam, and the cover screen displays the photo preview (and when you open the phone to use it normally, you can also activate the cover screen so people can see their pose for the main camera as well). The ubiquity of a weather app continues here, and if I wasn’t carrying a smartwatch, then the on-screen timer would prove useful. Oppo Find N2 Flip Ewan Spence Yet the cover screen doesn’t feel like part of the Find N2 Flip. It feels bolted on, and there’s no substantive interaction with the phone’s content. This is a bit of a chicken and egg situation - without the user base, why would developers support Oppo’s cover, and without existing apps, why would Oppo deliver a cover screen? The latter is the case, so Oppo will be hoping that developers will add support. Whether developers will support just the Find N2 Flip, Samsung’s Z Flip series, or any other folding device in years to come remains to be seen. There’s a danger that the cover screen becomes little more than a viewfinder and a clearing house for notifications. Not that this would be a bad thing; the Find N2 Flip meets its design goals without any 3rd party work, but what happens in a year’s time on the cover is an open question. What happens in the hinge mechanism and the main screen after twelve months of folding is another question. For all the talk of testing, certification, and experience, Oppo’s folding technology remains untested at the scale required for a global release. Oppo Find N2 Flip Ewan Spence The intricate folding mechanism is the stand-out feature for those looking at technical proficiency, but the real magic is how it simply disappears into the background. To all intents, the Find N2 Flip is a smartphone that sits at the top end of the mid-range. It falls just short of the big specifications of a flagship, but high enough up that it makes for a great day-to-day phone. That it folds in half to be more pocketable is the bonus that will help Oppo stand out in the global market. It’s going to draw inevitable comparisons to the Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 4… which means that Oppo will be seen as an equal in the comparisons that consumers will read. For its first global foldable, that’s a win. Now read the latest smartphone headlines in Forbes’ weekly Android news digest. . . Check out my website . Ewan Spence Editorial Standards Print Reprints & Permissions.