The Revolutionary Oppo Find N5: Exploring the World's Thinnest Book-Style Foldable
The launch of the Oppo Find N5, hailed as the world's thinnest book-style foldable phone, has generated considerable buzz in the tech community. Sleek, innovative, and impressively designed, it promises to redefine the foldable category, bringing it closer in feel and functionality to conventional slab smartphones. Having spent a week with this remarkable device, I've uncovered its many strengths, as well as some limitations that stem from its ultra-thin design.
Design: A Step Closer to Perfection
The most striking feature of the Oppo Find N5 is its design, which measures just 8.93mm when folded — a dimension that rivals many traditional smartphones. It weighs a mere 229 grams, making it lightweight and portable. The flat-side design of the Find N5 eliminates the gap typically seen in folded devices, making it feel almost seamless and indistinguishable from a slab phone when pulled from a pocket. While the Galaxy Z Fold 6 also boasts flat sides, its cover screen's aspect ratio detracts from a seamless slab-like experience. The Find N5, by contrast, with its flat aesthetics, is a notable advancement, offering a new benchmark for foldables in terms of design.
Display and Usability: An Experience Redefined
Unfolding the Oppo Find N5 reveals a device that is only 4.21mm thin, evoking the sensation of handling a sturdy piece of paper. Although it isn't the absolute thinnest foldable — with that title belonging to the tri-fold Huawei Mate XT Ultimate at 3.66mm — it remains the thinnest among book-style designs. This slimness improves the experience of reading and browsing, with a minimal crease that is finely calibrated. Initially, it was barely perceptible to the touch, although it became slightly more pronounced over time. A robust hinge mechanism supports confident unfolding, though it snaps open after a certain angle, a feature needing slight accommodation by users familiar with other models.
The interior display impresses with an 8.2-inch LTPO AMOLED screen, adept for reading due to its reduced reflectivity compared to the cover screen, though the latter is superior in color vividness. Capable of reaching outdoor brightness levels of 1,400 nits and 2,100 nits in HDR, it provides vibrant and immersive visuals. While tri-folds excel in offering a cinematic video-watching experience, Oppo's innovation allows content consumption in tent mode with minimized distractions from black bars, enhancing overall utility.
Battery and Performance: Pushing the Boundaries
With a 5,600mAh silicon-carbon battery, the Oppo Find N5 affords substantial power spanning a full day of moderate to heavy usage. Supported by 80W wired fast charging and 50W wireless AIRVOOC options, the device efficiently caters to a wide array of communication, social media, browsing, and photography applications. Although it houses a Snapdragon 8 Elite chipset — a 7-core configuration diverging slightly from the flagship 8-core CPUs — the performance remains largely on par, delivering satisfyingly quick responses but with occasional lags under heavy multitasking.
Game enthusiasts will appreciate the device's Championship mode, enhancing the gaming experience by boosting performance and suppressing notifications. Additionally, ColorOS 15, which forms the basis of its Android 15 interface, presents a collection of AI-focused tools that enhance imaging capabilities and foster seamless integration with Google services.
Camera Capabilities: Revisiting the System
Featuring a triple-camera setup led by a 50MP primary sensor with OIS, the Find N5 offers good daylight performance despite the reduced sensor size compared to its predecessors such as the OnePlus Open. Complemented by a 50MP periscope telephoto lens with 3x optical and 6x in-sensor zoom, alongside an 8MP ultrawide lens, the camera system is dependable, if slightly toned down for enthusiasts accustomed to Oppo's previous offerings.
The camera excels under favorable light, producing vivid shots bolstered by Hasselblad tuning. The periscope telephoto stands out for 6x zoom shots — among the best in the foldable genre. Nighttime performance is less stellar, owing to smaller sensors, yet Oppo's Master mode unlocks potential through RAW captures, offering a path for quality tweaking in post-processing apps like Lightroom.
Conclusion: A Leap Forward in Foldable Design
On the whole, the Oppo Find N5 represents an impressive convergence of form, functionality, and futuristic design, marking a significant milestone for foldable technology. Although it won't nestle into the U.S. markets soon and might not advance to an Open 2 iteration within the year, its lightweight profile, formidable battery life, and stellar display make it a compelling choice for tech enthusiasts. Despite certain compromises, its thoughtfully integrated enhancements position it favorably alongside — if not slightly ahead of — peers from Samsung and Google in realms of intuitive user experience and contemporary aesthetics.
