Oppo Find N5 review: A simply superior foldable

Yahoo

23-02-2025

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At the time of its launch, the Oppo Find N5 is the ultimate foldable phone. But even as new models arrive on the scene, it's hard to imagine the Find N5 losing its lead.
Thinning out its foldable's dimensions to previously unprecedented levels hasn't stopped Oppo from adding two beautiful displays, strong camera hardware, the latest chipset and a huge battery capacity to the Find N5.
Rivals like the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 6 or Google Pixel 9 Pro Fold look years out of date by comparison, and even the wonderful OnePlus Open can't keep up.
Sadly, we don't know how easy it's going to be to buy the Find N5, which makes it tough to decide where this device should sit on our best foldable phone list. The software support window is also shorter than you get from Samsung or Google. That's not ideal when you're spending this much on a foldable phone.
But you can't really fault this new Oppo foldable from a hardware perspective, as you'll see through the rest of my Find N5 review. I hope you aren't the jealous type if you already have a Z Fold or Pixel Fold.
The Oppo Find N5 was announced on February 20, but we have yet to get specific availability or pricing info outside of Singapore, where the launch took place. We'll update you as soon as we learn more.
Going for $2499 SGD with 512GB storage, the Find N5 seems to be aimed to be a touch cheaper than the Galaxy Z Fold 6, which goes for $2548 SGD in its basic spec. The Google Pixel 9 Pro Fold starts at $2,399 SGD, but it costs $2,579 if you want the same amount of storage capacity as the Oppo, making the Find N5 an attractive deal despite its high price.
Understandably, Oppo is crowing loudly about how the Find N5 is the "world's thinnest book-style foldable," meaning unless you're holding it next to a triple-foldable like the Huawei Mate XT, it's thinner than any other flexible phone around.
If you want specifics, the Find N5 is just 8.93mm thick when folded (just a touch thicker than the non-folding OnePlus 13), and a mere 4.21mm when open. That makes it slimmer than any other rival foldable, and even other devices sold on their sleekness like the 13-inch iPad Pro M4 (5.1mm or 0.2 inches thick). It's also just 229 grams (8.07 ounces) in weight, about 5-10% lighter than other book-style foldables.
Just to hammer home the slimness point, the USB-C port on the bottom of the Find N5 was apparently customized in order to fit in the slim frame. There is barely any metal on either side of the opening for the charging port, but it still feels sturdy when you plug in or remove cables.
The back, made from "aerospace-grade fiber" (not glass like a typical modern flagship phone) is daubed with either a matte Cosmic Black colorway, or a layered Misty White one.
The white model, which you can see in these photos, looks rather special, with the pattern in the back glass shifting in intriguing ways as you hold the phone in different lighting.
Both phones use aluminum side rails and inner frames, but have different finishes on each color option to match the style better. It's on these side rails where you'll find an alert slider for switching between normal, silent and vibrate profiles, a OnePlus staple that Oppo's started to borrow for some of its flagship phones.
Foldables aren't known for their durability, but Oppo's focused on waterproofing the Find N5, having it rated IPX6, X8 and X9. So while it's not rated for dust proofing, it is in theory able to shrug off splashes or immersion, or even jets of hot water were you ever to encounter them for some bizarre reason.
The main attraction of the Find N5 is its dual screens: an almost perfectly square 8.12-inch inner screen, larger than any rival device, and a 6.62-inch outer display with a slightly narrower than average width but a fairly similar shape to a regular phone.
Both panels have a 1 - 120Hz adaptive refresh rate, with a 2450-nit peak brightness on the outer screen and 2,100 on the inner display. The two screens also have 2160Hz PWM dimming to reduce eye strain.
The main screen does have a crease in it to allow it to fold, which covers about the same area as the Galaxy Z Fold 6's or Pixel 9 Pro Fold's. But the crease is quite a bit shallower than either of those foldables, meaning it's less obvious to the touch and to your eye.
Within its Hasselblad-branded camera block, the Oppo Find N5 houses a 50MP main camera, an 8MP ultrawide camera and a 50MP 3x telephoto camera. For front-facing sensors, the Find N5 uses a pair of 8MP punch-hole cameras, one on the inner display and one on the outer.
Neither the Galaxy Z Fold 6 nor the Pixel 9 Pro Fold are slouches when it comes to photography, so I took both out for my comparative testing, starting with this main camera shot of a sculpture outside Paddington Station.
The Pixel 9 Pro Fold's image is effectively a darker version of the Oppo Find N5's here. The Google foldable does have a little better contrast as a result though.
This shot over the Paddington Canal against the Galaxy Z Fold 6 shows the Find N5's shot again as the brighter one, with the Samsung going all-in on saturated colors.
The Oppo's ultrawide camera is its lowest-resolution sensor, and that shows in this shot of a latte in a bright red cup. The Find N5 shows the colors of the ceramic, coffee and milk in brighter hues, but the detail is very much lacking.
Oppo's 3x telephoto camera with 6x in-sensor zoom mode fits neatly with the 3x and 5x telephotos of the Galaxy Z Fold 6 and Pixel 9 Pro Fold respectively. So I pointed both at the archway of St Mary's Hospital to see the differences.
There's not much separating the Find N5 and the Galaxy Z Fold 6 in this 3x comparison. The Samsung's shot is brighter this time around, but its colors and detail are nowhere near as strong as the Find N5.
Despite relying on digital zoom for this 6x shot, the Find N5 is sharper than the Pixel 9 Pro Fold's, perhaps because the Pixel's sensor is a meager 10.8MP. The two shots' color and brightness levels are similar, but you can more easily make out the face of St Mary and the text around the plaque in the Find N5 image.
Finally we come to a pair of selfie comparisons, starting with the outer cameras and portrait mode enabled. This shot against the Galaxy Z Fold demonstrates that Samsung remains the master of portrait mode, cutting accurately around my glasses. It's offering a slightly cooler tone for my skin than the Find N5, but not in an obviously bad way.
Switching to the internal cameras, and to the Pixel 9 Pro Fold as my comparison phone, the Find N5 becomes the one furnishing us with a cooler-looking image. The brighter look of the Oppo shot doesn't help here, even if the Pixel has dialed up the colors a little too much as well.
Oppo picked the Snapdragon 8 Elite to drive the Find N5, making it the only foldable to use this chip at the time of its launch. The benchmarks show how far ahead this silicon puts it of currently-available foldables, but we can also see how similar the Find N5's scores are to the OnePlus 13, another phone from the combined Oppo/OnePlus stable that uses the 8 Elite chip.
The Find N5 comes with 16GB RAM and 512GB storage, which is just as generous as you'd hope for a super-premium foldable phone. That said, perhaps a 256GB storage edition would have been nice as an option to make the N5 a little more accessibly-priced.
By using a pair of silicon-carbon cells, Oppo has been able to fit 5,600 mAh of battery capacity into the Find N5. That's over 25% larger than the battery capacity of the Galaxy Z Fold 6, or 20% compared to the Pixel 9 Pro Fold.
That extra battery space isn't just for show either. The Find N5 lost 15% of its charge while playing three hours of YouTube over Wi-Fi at 50% brightness. The Galaxy Z Fold 6 drops 18% on the same test, and the Pixel 9 Pro Fold 21%.
Oppo also beats the competition with its charging speeds - 80W wired and 50W wireless. The latter works with the OnePlus/Oppo magnetic wireless charging puck provided you buy a case with the necessary magnets installed.
The Find N5 doesn't come with a charger in the box in every market due to regional laws. But if yours does, you'll be able to charge the Find N5 to from 0 - 34% in 15 minutes, to 66% in 30 minutes and to 100% in 52 minutes, based on my testing.
The typical collection of AI transcription, translation, summary and image editing tools comes with the Android 15-based ColorOS 15. Using the text features is especially good on the inner screen since the phone can use that extra space to show a before/after view of what you're working on.
There's also a Galaxy Z Fold 6-style interpreter mode, where you partly close the phone and then set it between you and another person for an instantly translated conversation. And there's Circle to Search and Gemini from Google.
For more general productivity, Boundless View is here. Like the OnePlus Open's Open Canvas, this keeps up to three app windows at a proper size while letting the user move between them like sliding a camera viewfinder over a flat layout of different documents.
It's far better than cramming your apps into a single static screen, which is the best that the Galaxy Z Fold 6 and Pixel 9 Pro Fold can do.
More uniquely, the Oppo offers O+ Connect, a sharing app that notably allows you to send photos to an iPhone with the respective app installed. This was introduced on the Find X8 series, but the Find N5 takes this a step further by now allowing you to pair the phone with a Mac (Intel or Apple Silicon), sharing files, and even controlling it remotely if you wish by downloading the O+ Connect Mac app from Oppo's website.
The app's rather demanding, requiring lots of permissions to be altered to make it work, but it does function, whether on Wi-Fi or on a cellular connection. There's lag to contend with, and having to swap between the trackpad and keyboard would get in the way of full-on work sessions.
But navigating my MacBook from the Find N5 did work, even down to the trackpad gestures. I wouldn't use this much, but I can see it coming in handy sometimes.
Oppo does offer an Oppo Pen stylus for doodling on the Find N5. This works on both the inside and outside displays, a step ahead of the Galaxy Z Fold 6's S Pen which functions only on the internal screen. However, there's no indication where this Oppo stylus is sold as of yet, so it might be hard to get hold of one depending on where you live.
Oppo has been offering its latest flagship phones five years of software updates and six years of security updates, which is hopefully enough to last most owners before they upgrade. But both Google and Samsung offer seven years of updates for their latest foldables.
If Oppo offered a couple of extra years of software support, and guaranteed that users around the world have direct route to buying the Find N5, then it would be as perfect a foldable as we could have right now. But even without those two problems addressed, this is still a long way ahead of the current best foldables.
The Galaxy Z Fold 6 and Pixel 9 Pro Fold are going to have to undergo huge improvements if their next-gen versions want to compete. But the fact that they're going to be sold in the U.S. and the Oppo isn't will keep them as the best available foldables for a huge amount of possible customers.
We had hoped that the OnePlus Open 2 would be along soon, borrowing large parts of the Find N5's design along the way, but OnePlus has confirmed it won't launch a foldable this year.
That said, if you can buy an Oppo Find N5, you will be getting your money's worth and then some. Users wanting more value from a flagship device or the ultimate cameras may want to look elsewhere, but if your heart is set on a foldable, and you want the best performance, power efficiency and a futuristic design that's practical to use open or closed, the Find N5 is the phone to seek out.