Oppo Find N3 review: Reimagining book-style foldables the right way

Unfurling the foldable future

Foldables have been in a weird space for a while now; it’s no longer an oddity that'll earn you curious stares, with foldable shipments expected to hit 18.3 million units by the end of 2023. Sadly, the technology isn’t yet quite as polished as a more traditional smartphone. Until now.

The Oppo Find N3 is possibly the most refined take on a book-style folding smartphone that we’ve tested so far. 

TL;DR: With an almost invisible crease and excellent multitasking, the Oppo Find N3 is an excellent folding phone that offers the best of the large screen with as few of the downsides as possible.

Equipped with the company’s third-generation Flexion Hinge, the phone has been certified for up to 1,000,000 folds, even in temperatures ranging from 50°C to -20°C. Despite its build, the phone is also incredibly lightweight and slim, weighing just 239g or 245g (Classic Black and Champagne Gold, respectively) and measuring just 5.8mm when unfolded. 

Oppo also upgraded both displays to the same specifications, even though they differed in size and aspect ratio. Both LTPO AMOLEDs have a 120Hz refresh rate, HDR10+, Dolby Vision, and peak brightness of 2,800 nits. Oppo also claims to have improved the internal display's durability, with the screen now 36% more resistant to warping than the Find N3’s predecessors.

Unlike other fodables, Oppo also ensured a premium experience with its photography. The brand included Sony’s new LYTIA-T808 stacked pixel 1/1.43-inch sensor for the 48MP main camera, while upgrading to a 64MP telephoto camera and sticking to a 48MP ultra-wide camera with the same Sony IMX581 sensor from before. The Oppo-Hasselblad collaboration continues, with subtle Hasselblad branding on the large circular rear camera bump.

Running on the 4nm Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 chip and paired with 16GB of LPDDR5X RAM and 512GB of UFS 4.0 storage, the Oppo Find N3 certainly looks very impressive on paper, especially when considering the S$2,399 price tag. Let’s take a deeper dive into how the phone looks and feels in the hand before getting into the rest.

Taller, thinner, bigger

The Oppo Find N3 doesn’t resemble the Find N2 all that much. It looks similar to the OnePlus Open, thanks to the new camera bump on the rear. It really is a bit of a statement, and it means the Oppo and OnePlus (Oppo subsidiary since 2021) phones have a consistent aesthetic. We have found that the camera bump's protrusion catches on fabric when sliding into a pocket or a bag occasionally. 

When folded, the phone measures 11.7mm, almost 2mm thinner than the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold5. Oppo told us this was a deliberate choice to make its secondary display more comfortable for conventional use.

Also introduced was an alert slider on the phone's left edge (when opened) that switches between Silent, Vibrate and Ring modes, with unique vibration haptics for each setting when activated. It’s a nice feature that I found myself utilising quite a bit, and it's also present on its clamshell sibling.

When unfolded, the right edge hosts the volume and power buttons, with the latter doubling up as a fingerprint scanner. The slimness of the power button resulted in several attempts to scan my thumb accurately and unlock the device, although I can chalk this up to my natural grip.

A workaround that I’ve found is to register a second thumbprint while focusing on the edges of my thumb when doing the registration scan. With it, my fingerprint gets scanned and unlocked correctly every time on the first attempt.

The Find N3 comes with Oppo’s new Flexion Hinge that uses self-developed aircraft-grade steel and a super-rigid zirconium-based liquid metal to achieve a 15% reduction in volume while still being rated to last up to 1,000,000 folds. There are also carbon-fibre support plates to help resist warping, and the inner display comes with a new coating that has a self-healing layer to smooth out scuffs.

Oppo claims that the “Find N3 comes incredibly close to creating a perfectly level surface”, and while this may sound like marketing fluff, the inner display has one of the least noticeable creases on a folding smartphone. You can still feel the crease if you run a finger over it, but the near-creaseless appearance adds a new level of sophistication and premium feel that Samsung cannot replicate (for now).

Fantastic displays

Here's a look at the similarly-specced displays.

The external Cover Screen saw Oppo increasing it to 6.31-inch (20:9 aspect ratio), making it one of the biggest external screen on a foldable phone at the moment. It’s a 2,484 x 1,116 LTPO AMOLED display that has an adaptive refresh rate from 1-120Hz and works perfectly fine for normal use texting, gaming and more. The reduced thickness certainly helps, giving us a folded experience that's almost like using a regular phone.

Inside comes a huge 7.8-inch LTPO AMOLED display (1.07:1 aspect ratio) that also has a 1-120Hz adaptive refresh rate. Both displays have features like 1440Hz PWM dimming, a peak brightness of 2,800 nits, and support for Dolby Vision and HDR10+. Both screens are a joy to use, with bright outputs and vibrant reproduction of colours. 

In my experience, gaming on the inner screen might be an issue. Playing games like Honkai: Star Rail on the Cover Screen was perfectly fine, but when switching to the inner screen, you get an extremely zoomed-in perspective that can be quite disconcerting. I’ve found other games that worked around this by introducing black bars at the top and bottom to offer a better aspect ratio fit, and that's a nicer solution, even if it's less sightly.

For videos, you get the black bars on the top and bottom of the screen, but its sheer size makes it a much better viewing experience, especially compared to the smaller screens on standard smartphones. Reading ebooks, browsing the web, and more are also much more enjoyable on the inner screen. 

Improved multitasking & productivity

If you’re a multitasker, you’ll absolutely be delighted with the Find N3 and how the large inner display performs.

It’s so easy to open multiple apps and with Oppo’s Boundless View, the phone can have up to three apps open in full-screen. Just drag and drop apps from either the App Library or the File Pocket on the leftmost side of the TaskBar. 

The App Library is self-explanatory, but the File Pocket is a nice feature that shows you what images or files you’ve recently used or downloaded so you can drag them easily into an app.

I’ve taken advantage of Boundless View plenty of times when looking up details in an email while working on documents. I even use it for my favourite characters in Honkai: Star Rail, quickly cross-referencing online guides and my in-game relics by having both the game and the browser open.

If you have three apps open, a four-finger pinch will send the phone into Full View Mode, allowing you to see all three windows and interact with them at once.

Like Samsung, it's also possible to save app "combos", so if you like to watch Netflix while chatting with your friends on WhatsApp, or if you enjoy scrolling through Facebook and Instagram together like me, it’s doable. The saved combo will be available on the home screen for easy access. 

Oppo’s ColorOS has been improving over the years, and the Find N3 is running ColorOS 13, which is Oppo’s reskin of Android 13. It’s generally smooth and easy to use, with very little bloatware pre-installed on the phone, so thumbs up to Oppo here.

Before moving on, I want to mention that Oppo provides a two-piece phone casing in the box. The top piece requires you to use the pre-applied adhesive to ensure it sticks properly to the frame of the phone.

I’m not a big fan of this because adhesives leave residue after a while, so this might be an issue if you want to remove the case after a long period of use.

The adhesive backing also needs to be removed, as the rear does cover up the speaker and microphone grills on the top and bottom of the phone. The provided case forces one to stick the case on if they want to use it. That being said, it’s good that Oppo at least includes it in the box and leaves it up to the consumer whether they want to use the case or not. 

Unfortunately, the Oppo Find N3 only comes with an IPX4 water resistance rating, which falls slightly short of other flagship phones.

Imaging Performance

The cameras have been improved, with Oppo continuing the partnership with Hasselblad for a triple camera array on the rear:

• 24mm 48MP main camera (1/1.43-inch Sony LYTIA-T808 sensor, 1.12µm, f/1.7 aperture)
• 70mm 64MP telephoto camera (1/2-inch OmniVision sensor, 0.7µm, f/2.6 aperture)
• 12mm 48MP ultra-wide camera (1/2-inch Sony IMX581sensor, 0.8µm, f/2.2 aperture)

Foldable phones haven't done very well when it comes to photography, but the Oppo Find N3 bucks that trend.

The main camera performed excellently under good lighting conditions, giving even conventional phones like iPhone 15 Pro Max a run for their money. It certainly tops the Galaxy Z Fold5 at imaging quality, and you don't even need to be a pro to tell them apart.

In dimly lit situations, the phone provides a relatively accurate portrayal of what can be seen with the eye without much (if any) image processing to brighten up the photo.

I would argue that it’s better to capture an image that can be brightened up in post-processing while retaining accurate-to-life colours, but that’s because I typically edit all of my photos before posting to social media anyway.

Perhaps Oppo should consider an option for casual users who want a nicely exposed photo with a slight boost to the vibrance and saturation without having to delve into the edit feature in the Photos app.

The telephoto camera is the real showstopper. It retains so much detail even when shooting from afar, like the pictures above.

I mostly skipped the 2x in-sensor zoom option where possible in favour of the 3x optical, because the 2x zoom resulted in more smudged areas and lost detail and resolution in darker areas. This might not always be possible due to framing constraints, but with some creativity, the 3x option definitely provides much better quality images.

The ultra-wide camera is serviceable and vibrant, although it occasionally distorts. Thankfully, the distortion isn’t quite noticeable unless you have buildings or other strong lines at the corners of the images, so a bit of conscientiousness when framing shots will go a long way.

There’s also a ProXDR feature when viewing photos in the gallery, although it seems just to brighten up the highlights and bright regions of an image. It’s turned on by default, so it’s not an issue, as it generally makes an image more lively. Once you start editing the photo, ProXDR will no longer be available.

Benchmark Performance

The Oppo Find N3 comes with a Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 processor, just freshly knocked off the “newest flagship processor” throne by the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 made for 2024 phones. Regardless, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 is still a formidable chip you can get now and it's one that provides more than enough power for the Find N3 when paired with 16GB of LPDDR5X RAM and 512GB of UFS 4.0 storage. 

In Singapore, the Oppo Find N3 only comes in one variant, with 16GB of RAM and 512GB of storage. There is also a model with 16GB of RAM and 1TB of storage, but that isn’t available on our shores.

Putting it to the test

To find out how the competitors line up specs and price-wise, check them out in this link.

For this review, we've tried our best to pick opponents in the same (foldable) playing field such as the Oppo Flip N3, Samsung Galaxy Z Fold5 and Z Flip5, and some non-folding phones like the Google Pixel 8 Pro. 

To find out more about the tests we conduct and what they relate to, we've jotted them down here.

Benchmark Performance remarks

The synthetic benchmark results out of the Oppo Find N3 are a little surprising. The Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 is the most powerful chip available in an Android smartphone at the time of this review, but the benchmark results aren’t all that fantastic, unfortunately. 

The Jetstream benchmark seemed an anomaly until we noticed that the Oppo Find N3 Flip also had very low scores. However, trying other web browsers for the tests brought the numbers back up to a more reasonable level compared to the low scores we were getting on Chrome. 

Regardless, the numbers don’t mean everything. Our day-to-day usage on Chrome or Opera is smooth and there’s no stuttering or lagging even when having multiple apps open in Boundless View.

Battery Life

Our new battery benchmark uses 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. 

In real-world use, the battery life is absolutely great. The Oppo Find N3 uses about 10% while idling for 24 hours with occasional notifications, about 10% for an hour of photography and 15% for 60Hz gaming at max brightness. Over a day of using the phone both with the Cover Screen and the internal screen, it consumed just under 60% battery with moderate use watching videos, scrolling through social media and browsing the web. 

The Find N3 supports Oppo’s 67W SuperVOOC Flash Charging, with a compatible charger and cable included in the box, which is nice. Thanks to that fast charging, a quick 16 minute charge brought the phone from empty to 50%, and a full charge from 0% only took about 54 minutes. Unfortunately, the phone doesn’t support wireless charging, which isn't acceptable for a flagship smartphone that costs this much.

The book-style foldable we never knew we wanted

While the Oppo Find N3 isn’t affordable by any means, its S$2,399 price tag is a little more palatable when you consider the fact that the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold5 costs S$2,579 for the same 512GB model, although that phone only comes with 12GB of RAM.

Even though folding phones are slowly starting to become more mainstream, the price still remains relatively high at this time. However, it has been getting more affordable slowly compared to the jaw-dropping S$3,088 price when the Samsung Galaxy Fold first launched back in 2019.

The UI is easy to use, and Oppo has really leaned into making the most use of the larger screen for multitasking with Boundless View being an incredibly elegant and refined feature. For power users, the Oppo Find N3 actually feels fun to use, whether it’s for reading ebooks, multitasking between emails and documents or more.

But the best part of the phone has to be the almost unnoticeable crease. Oppo has done fantastically in almost eliminating that pesky bit, and thus taken a big step forward in removing one of the major pain points of folding phones.

Additionally, Oppo is offering a “Premium Service” plan for the Find N3 series phones, with a refresh service that offers free screen protector replacements, cleaning, servicing and even a discounted display replacement if needed.

If a Samsung Galaxy Z Fold5 doesn’t quite tickle your fancy due to the higher price and the visible crease, the Oppo Find N3 might be the solution. It even comes with impressive cameras and multitasking to sate your standard smartphone needs.

For a phone with a flip form factor, we’ve also tested out the Oppo Find N3 Flip, so check out our review on that phone.

The Oppo Find N3 comes in Champagne Gold and Classic Black, with an official price of S$2,399 for 16GB of RAM and 512GB of storage.

You can get it at authorised Oppo stores island-wide and the phone is also available on Oppo’s Shopee, Lazada and TikTok stores, alongside Amazon, StarHub, Singtel, KrisShop, iShopChangi and Qoo10. View all promotions and availability here.

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