Oppo Find N2 Flip review: Flipping the cards in a game of foldables

Note: This article was first published as a preview on 9th March 2023, and is now updated as a full review of the Oppo Find N2 Flip.

For old times' sake?

Do you wish the good times would come back again?

That's a broad, yet oddly specific statement to these times, and one that Chinese phone makers would likely have plenty to say about.

Since the U.S. sanctions kicked in in 2019, Chinese smartphone companies appear to be very cautious with the premium or flagship phones launched outside of their home market. What were once things like periscope zoom cameras, high-megapixel ultra-wides, and homegrown components for dedicated computing tasks have been conspicuously missing from all but the very highest-end Chinese handsets. It’s almost as if they’re wary of treading on tails by having a piece of tech inside that might be taken the wrong way...

But this review isn't about what's right or wrong. This review is about Oppo and the company doing everything they can to make a foldable smartphone good enough to take on the growing number of foldable phone users worldwide.

Like its main rivals, the Oppo N2 Flip shares many commonalities with other clamshell-type foldables, so if you want the hard details on what Oppo offers, you can check out our initial launch coverage here, or the table below. 

Flipping the pages of foldable phone history

Flip phones were once considered the epitome of 'high SES', and its pioneer was Motorola’s StarTAC, if you asked most phone enthusiasts of the past.

Its launch price of US$1,000 was not a small sum in 1996, considering that money had the same buying power as ~US$1,938 in today's currency (based on the U.S. Bureau of Labour Statistics's inflation calculator). Owning one immediately made you the talk of the town.

In 2003, an iconic follow-on came in the form of the Motorola RAZR (our review here). But, alas, there was not to be a third act: in 2007, the iPhone and subsequent generations of Android devices, together with their touchscreens and app stores, all but put paid to the future of "small screen-plus-T9 keyboard" form factors. Since then, only the Koreans have attempted to shoehorn Android into devices like the Galaxy Folder and LG Wine Smart (which this writer still owns.)

Just before the modern foldable iterations, LG made a valiant attempt to create “dual-screen” cases that would pair with its Android smartphones, but their popularity has remained tepid. The market cried out for more: a single foldable display without gaps between screens.

In 2013, Samsung demonstrated concepts in this vein and finally delivered in February 2019 as the Galaxy Fold.

Consider the abovementioned theory of the cautious Chinese phone maker and the lead the Korean juggernaut has built up outside of China. Now, we have China-only foldable devices from Xiaomi, Huawei, Honor, Vivo, and even Oppo itself. Yet, the Oppo Find N2 Flip is only the third folding-screen device available officially outside China with native Google Mobile Services, if you're not counting on the Royole FlexPai devices and the Honor Magic Vs coming to Singapore.

Oppo's take on a foldable phone

Our Oppo Find N2 Flip review unit has come to us in a sandstone colourway the company termed “Astral Black”.

On the outside, the Find N2 Flip's 3.26-inch AMOLED touchscreen is the first thing to catch your eye (not only because of what you can do with it, but more on that later.)

Inside, a 6.8-inch E6 AMOLED panel packing FHD+ resolution (2,520 x 1,080 pixels), with a noticeable but inoffensive crease, refreshes at 120Hz, and can handle HDR10+. The grunt work of TikTok scrolling and Reddit browsing is borne by a MediaTek Dimensity 9000+ processor, which shuffles apps around in ColorOS 13, based on Android 13.

The cameras are a 50MP main with an 8MP ultrawide (you probably have comments by now, as we do) and a 32MP punch-hole selfie shooter. You get a 67W SuperVOOC charger in the box (despite the phone's 44W wired fast charging capability) and a pair of case halves made of hard clear acrylic.

Playing the long (screen) game

Holding the Oppo Find N2 Flip against the Samsung Galaxy Z Flip4 is akin to a study of their external design language from two distinct approaches. The Korean rival integrates both the camera and outer display into a sleek black upper strip, while the Find N2 Flip’s outer display is front-and-centre. Not only is Oppo's version larger than Samsung’s, but the use of a portrait display also confers some advantages.

Since we’re conditioned to portrait displays, the Find N2 Flip gives the momentary impression to the uninitiated that this is “half a phone”; a fully working mini-phone, as it were. 

Similarly, messages and graphics are displayed far more naturally than the Z Flip4's horizontal screen. Oppo's phone does especially well with wallpapers, and it’s also excellent as a camera viewfinder, simply because we’re habituated to selfies being taken in portrait, rather than landscape.

Which phone has the advantage here? If flip foldables are all about the idea of “half a phone” - then, they'd command attention when at a café (or classroom) table next to “normie” (Internet slang for "normal"), bar-type mobiles. 

If I wanted a device I could flaunt, I’d personally go for the Find N2 Flip. There’s just something that makes the phone equally disconcerting and mildly amusing about having a portrait “mini-phone” screen next to two relatively large camera lenses.

Shock and awe value aside, another advantage of the Find N2 Flip is that it folds without a gap, thanks to Oppo’s so-called New Generation Flexion Hinge.

If you recall, the Galaxy Z Flip4 has a gap near its hinge -- and because some people associate foldables with Samsung and are therefore likely familiar with this drawback -- the Oppo’s "gapless" fold manages to make it a victim of its own success. When the phone is closed, it resembles a makeup case at certain angles (especially in the Moonlit Purple colourway.) 

How Samsung strikes a critical return blow to Oppo's take is the IPX8-rated water resistance on the Z Flip4. The Find N2 Flip is apparently only splashproof, and therefore less suitable for pool shenanigans (for selfies, or playtime with the kids).

Also, current foldables aren’t great with dust and dirt. They will probably require some TLC at the end of each day; more so if you have linty bags or pockets. That's something both brands have yet to figure out with their flippy mobiles.

Also, don’t ever try to open foldable flip phones like Find N2 Flip with one hand. You either risk ruining your manicure, or having your fingernails possibly making a nice deep scratch in the flexible display.

More flex, more depth

An apparent advantage of Oppo’s Flexion Hinge comes from the idea that since the inner display is pushed below the depth of the phone's shell when closed. Its bend radius can be larger compared to the competition. This has obvious implications for both display lifespan and the all-important crease when the phone is opened.

The "decreased crease" is indeed not obvious even when the display is active. This is helped by the 1600-nit brightness of the 6.8-inch FHD+ resolution panel. The irony here is it's a Samsung-manufactured panel, using its latest-generation E6 AMOLED material on LTPO backplane circuitry. Each successive material iteration brings more brightness with a reduction in power consumption.

We certainly had no issues viewing the inner and outer displays indoors and in the bright morning sunlight. It helps that the display also appeared to have an anti-reflective coating.

Perhaps the definitive weakness of the Find N2 Flip’s is the speaker setup. It's thankfully stereo, but calling it as such conceals deeper flaws to the casual buyer. The audio quality is at best serviceable.

Even at high volumes, our music and movie audio lacked meaningful definitions in the higher and lower frequency bands. For us, these speakers should just be left to speakerphone calls.

ColorOS 13 - reaching its steady-state

The Find N2 Flip runs ColorOS 13 (its proprietary Android 13 reskin) with nothing really new to recent users of Oppo, Realme, or even OnePlus phones. Most UI/UX flaws, like random Capitalisation For Some menu Options but Not For others, have been ironed out. ColorOS and its “variants” have reached a level of design maturity that isn’t likely to cause any complaints. 

For the outer display, you can expect the usual selection of clocks, custom text and fonts, and even an interactive digital pet with five different animals, but here's a “mini-phone” use case that could be a deal-sealer for some: According to an XDA thread, CoverScreen OS, which was originally developed for Galaxy Z Flip3 and Flip4 Cover Screens, now boasts support for the Find N2 Flip as well. Imagine turning the outer display into a whole phone unto itself with a proper app launcher, and full apps running in the cover screen, with access to widgets, toggles and media playback!

Unfortunately, we had to hand the phone back a couple of days after the app was first released, and it was likely still in the early stages of public release at the time, so we could not get it to start properly. Thus, we’ll have to leave you to test this one out for yourself.

The Find N2 Flip's fingerprint sensor is built into the power button; we didn’t find its placement very natural or nifty when the phone was unfolded. The thin build doesn't quite work when you grasp the phone with one hand while trying to unfold it with the other, since the unlocking finger might land in the wrong place. What is very cool, however, is that face unlock works even with the phone folded, using the main cameras!

Imaging Performance

Let’s talk about each camera on the Oppo Find N2 Flip. 

The primary camera is 50MP. It's more megapixels than Galaxy Z Flip4's, but the catch is it lacks OIS, and has a 1/1.56-inch and 1.0-um pixel size. That's not a big sensor compared to a Pixel 7 Pro, which is similarly priced and packing a 1/1.31-inch sensor with the same megapixel count.

Oppo makes up for that with Quad Bayer pixel binning. Does it make you feel better about the small pixels? Maybe. Why not throw in some Hasselblad imaging science for you? Oppo also has that added. How about a MariSilicon X NPU for Oppo's self-proclaimed “AI-enabled dynamic range and noise reduction”? Oppo also has that covered.

Whatever the additions are, the main camera fares well in good and low-light scenarios. There's little to worry about when shooting with the main camera. Save for a slight green cast in some images, everything is as it should be, within the realms of smartphone photography.

You might be curious to know how the UI works when the camera is half-folded. Oppo Find N2 Flip lets you prop it up on a flat surface (tripods begone) and do some rather nifty things, such as this cool timelapse from the heights of Kim Tian:

The real rub lies in the ultrawide camera: it’s a meagre 8MP. For a phone priced at $1,299, this doesn’t seem very MariSilicon of you, Oppo… 

8MP paired with a sensor from 2018 that was first found on the front cameras of the Google Pixel 3 just made sure that images in virtually all conditions -- even outdoor landscapes in great lighting -- could not stand up to the sort of quality you might find on less expensive “normie” phones with far better camera specs - such as Oppo’s own Find X5 Pro (whose street price appears to be just S$958 as of the time of writing).

Dynamic range was lacking, and images sometimes had unnatural colour renditions. Compare this with one of the earlier photos shot by the main camera with the ultrawide variation below.

A noticeable amount of edge sharpening is used to mask softness in textures (check out the trees in the shot below), but the processing seems to have given up on the shadow dynamic range.

Trying this ultrawide shooter at night is also disappointing, Night Mode or not. 

The images it gives us don't indicate S$1,000+ quality in 2023. You cannot find any details in the shadows, for instance:

What’s also a bit disappointing about the Find N2 Flip is the lack of any real telephoto capability; there are only two cameras, remember? As a result, you’d do well to avoid zooming past about 2-3x to avoid funky artefacts that you can’t hide from anyone.

The selfie camera is a 32MP unit… and has AutoFocus. Why this and not OIS on the main camera, Oppo? That said, it works like a charm:

Because it has AF, it’s not actually worse than the main camera when taking selfies, despite its much smaller sensor size. Compare the above 32MP selfie camera mugshot with the one below, taken with the main camera and the phone folded.

Benchmark performance

While most flip foldables and past Oppo flagships have relied on high-end Qualcomm silicon to provide motive power, Oppo chose to go with MediaTek this round. Thankfully, this is not some “2+6” big.LITTLE or even Cortex-A78 configuration (which would be positively sacrilegious in a phone of this calibre), but a proper Dimensity 9000+ flagship-tier processor. 

It's not the very latest and greatest setup but it still offers a Cortex-X2 at up to 3.0GHz, three A710 cores at 2.85GHz and four Cortex-A510 at 1.8GHz, all baked into a 4nm TSMC process. It’s certainly not to be taken lightly, and it can hold its own against the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1+ in the Galaxy Z Flip4 5G.

In this round of benchmarks, we looked at how the Find N2 Flip does against its Korean folding competitor. For good measure we’ll throw in three non-foldable phones in the same price bracket to help you see what you might (or might not) miss out on. The Google Pixel 7 Pro, a Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra, and Oppo’s own Find X5 Pro all feature different CPU types, but strong imaging chops.

JetStream 2.0

JetStream 2 is a combination of a variety of JavaScript and Web Assembly benchmarks, including benchmarks that came before like SunSpider and Octane. It primarily tests for a system’s and browser’s ability in delivering a good web experience. It runs a total of 64 subtests, each weighted equally, with multiple iterations, and takes the geometric mean to compute the overall score. The higher the score, the better.

Geekbench 5

Geekbench CPU is a cross-platform processor benchmark that tests both single-core and multi-core performance with workloads that simulate real-world usage. Geekbench 5 scores are calibrated against a baseline score of 1000, which is the score of an Intel Core i3-8100. The higher the score, the better.

3DMark Wild Life (Unlimited)

3DMark Wild Life is a cross-platform benchmark for Windows, Android and Apple iOS for measuring GPU performance. Its graphics test consists of multiple scenes with variations in the amount of geometry, lights and post-processing effects, mirroring mobile games that are based on short bursts of intense activity. Wild Life uses the Vulkan graphics API on Windows PCs and Android devices. On iOS devices, it uses Metal.

In Unlimited mode, the benchmark runs offscreen using a fixed time step between frames. Unlimited mode renders exactly the same frames in every run on every device, regardless of resolution scaling. The higher the score, the better.

PCMark for Android - Work 3.0 and Storage 2.0

PCMark for Android is a benchmark for testing the performance of Android phones and tablets. The Work 3.0 test checks how the device handles common productivity tasks such as browsing the web, editing videos, working with documents and data, and editing photos. Storage 2.0 checks write-in and read-out performance for internal storage, external storage (if applicable), and SQLite database management. Together, the benchmarks can clue us in on how capable a phone is at handling everyday use. Work 3.0 scores are above, while Storage 2.0 scores are immediately below for each device - the higher the score, the better.

Benchmark Performance Remarks

Overall, Oppo wisely chose a true flagship processor, albeit not the very newest. It ensures that the Find N2 Flip does not want for power.

In real-world operating conditions, there wasn't anything we tried that this phone that it could not handle. The Dimensity 9000+ has only shown up slightly against its Qualcomm competition in the Galaxy Z Flip4 regarding graphics performance. But then again, one could argue that Google’s own flagship non-foldable is hardly anything to write home about in this department either…

On to the next section, and for many choosing a slim and stylish phone, possibly the one that really matters: Versus non-foldables, will just a 4,300mAh battery capacity be sufficient for a daily driver?

Battery Life

Before we go into our battery uptime and charging results, a quick reminder on our revamped battery review process: we’ve embarked on a more holistic approach to our battery tests that looks beyond a single performance metric determining a phone’s overall battery life. The previous video-based version worked well for handsets from simpler times, but your modern smartphone does much more than play videos.

Thus we now use PCMark for Android’s Work 3.0 Battery Life test to determine a modern Android-based smartphone's battery uptime in minutes. This controlled benchmark simulates real-world usage with a combination of both web and social media browsing, video and photo editing, parsing data with various file formats, writing (on documents), and more.

To enhance consistency in battery results, we start the test at: 

• 100% of the phone’s battery capacity until 20% left
• A fixed display brightness is calibrated at 200cd/m2 (200-lux) with the help of a luminance meter 
• Max resolution
• Refresh rates unlocked
• 0% audio, or completely silenced where possible
• Full bars of Wi-Fi connectivity, Bluetooth, and notifications enabled
• Only one other battery recording app opened in the background
• Scored in uptime minutes; the higher, the better

Using a fixed brightness level and muted audio avoids “penalising” high-end phones with excellent hardware components that offer brighter, or louder, experiences. These parameters are also achievable by most Android phones outside of the flagship class. The benchmark cuts off at 20% as most phones have aggressive power-saving features that can affect these parameters. We do not put an upper cap on refresh rates, since it lets us test for adaptive refresh rates playing a part in battery management. Resolution may play a part in battery consumption, but we’ll be testing at max available resolution and make a note if the phone doesn’t offer high-resolution displays.

And now for some disclosure: The Find N2 Flip refused to complete this battery test. It would crash at the 20% mark without any final score, which we suspect is due to the Dimensity 9000+ chipset, or perhaps a software bug, not playing nice. We sent a query to PCMark, but did not receive a reply in time. 

To get a usable result, we decided to interpolate a set of measurements of the displayed battery life while the test was running versus the time into the test, taken at 100% (of course), 69%, 55%, and 25%. It’s not the full benchmark, but it’s definitely as good as one.

Fortunately, we're still doing our old battery life tests, which involves:

• Looping a 720p video with screen brightness and volume at 100%
• Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connectivity turned on
• Constant data streaming through email

In the old test, we noticed very good battery life, if not one of the longest for a 6.8-inch display. We suspect the E6 AMOLED material’s energy-efficiency is at play here, and if you needed convincing that phones should never be evaluated on their battery capacity numbers alone, well, here it is.

It is definitely better than the Samsung Galaxy Z Flip4 in this area, and puts up a decent fight against non-foldables, though there is no hiding the loss of 700mAh of capacity versus the standard of 5,000mAh for just about every flagship phone these days. 

Still, most people who unplug for the morning commute should be able to make it to evening on a full charge if they don’t tax the higher-powered cores in the Dimensity 9000+ with activities such as gaming and videography. As a point of comparison, we used about 10% of our battery in half an hour of photography with the phone open and closed each about half of the time.

In the box of the Oppo Find N2 Flip, we received a 67W SuperVOOC charger despite the phone being rated for only 44W. The USB cable we had on hand reported only 30W+ charging speeds at times.

Yet, there was no problem getting it from 0-100% in slightly over an hour, which should suffice for most people. Now, we do have a thought: the Find N2 Flip is definitely more usable even with the screen closed than its closest competitor, which could perhaps make that 4,300mAh enough to get through all but the busiest workdays.

Conclusion

What exactly do we buy foldable phones for? When you really distil your needs, this Find N2 Flip review may seem harsh, or overwhelmingly glowing.

Camera prowess may be the single most important thing to many phone buyers these days. The Find N2 Flip is not actually as bad as we’ve made it out to be, simply because the Galaxy Z Flip4 isn’t exactly better in the camera department, what with its 12MP cameras and OIS still only on the main shooter. No, if you want something you can slay with on Instagram, you need a “normie” phone, and you probably know that already.

As we mentioned at the start of this article, the Find N2 Flip delivers where you’d expect: a statement-making device that does everything else well enough. Set it down on a table and its large portrait outer display can be a conversation starter. Unfold it, and some might be asking to take a look. Those with previous-gen foldables might even envy your screen's near-creaseless look. 

If you can live without water resistance, or if the ultrawide camera isn’t a huge priority, consider that the Find N2 Flip still delivers a flagship-grade processor and a battery that can keep up even with devices with larger capacities.

Taken solely on its merits as a phone, you’re getting a device that, at a recommended retail price of $1,299, not only undercuts its main rival (which is $1,411 directly from Samsung Singapore as of the time of writing) but, for that matter, numerous other non-foldable flagship devices. 

And it folds. What’s not to like?

The Oppo Find N2 Flip can be had from Lazada, Shopee, Qoo10, Amazon, iShopChangi, Challenger, SingTel, M1, and StarHub.