5 reasons why the Oppo Find N5 is the best foldable you can’t buy

Summary

Chinese phone maker Oppo has just taken the wraps off of its latest book-style foldable, the Find N5.
The Find N5 is the thinnest foldable to release as yet, and it’s also the first to arrive with an IPX9 water resistance rating.
Unfortunately, the device isn’t available in the US.

In the wonderful world of foldable smartphones, a diverse range of competing manufacturers are vying for the top crown. Globally, book-style folding phone makers like Honor, Xiaomi, Huawei, Vivo, and Oppo are rapidly advancing their hardware ambitions on a year-by-year basis. Recently, we’ve even seen the first mass-produced tri-fold smartphone hit the international stage.

By contrast, the North American foldable phone market is somewhat drab and devoid of options. Apple has yet to enter the market segment, leaving Samsung as the one major industry juggernaut. With other players like Google, OnePlus, and Motorola commanding much smaller slices of the foldable pie, there’s little incentive for Samsung to innovate or to push boundaries.

Oppo’s newly-announced Find N5, then, is perhaps the quintessential example of a boundary-breaking foldable phone that US and Canadian customers are missing out on. The device starts at $2,499 SGD (roughly $1,870 USD), and ships in a single 16GB of RAM and 512G of storage configuration. Here are 5 reasons why the Find N5 is the best book-style handset that you can’t buy.

Oppo Find N5

The Oppo Find N5 is a book-style foldable smartphone with a super-slim design, the Snapdragon 8 Elite processor, and a triple array of rear camera sensors.

1 The Find N5 is the thinnest foldable yet

Oppo takes the crown away from Honor, the previous thin-chassis champion

Back when I reviewed the Honor Magic V3 last year, I was shocked at just how thin of a foldable the company was able to engineer. Fast-forward a few months, and rival Chinese phone maker Oppo is snatching Honor’s crown away with the release of its Find N5.

When closed shut, the Oppo Find N5 measures in at an impressively svelte 0.35-inches (8.94 mm) thin, which the company describes as being ‘as slim as a pencil.’ This makes the device as thin as — or thinner than — many flagship candy bar-style phones currently on the market.

When folded open into tablet mode, the Find N5’s thinness reaches 0.17-inches (4.21 mm), which is enough to make just about every other mobile device blush. The phone’s chassis is so slim, in fact, that its USB-C port barely fits within the bottom frame of the unit.

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2 The Find N5 is easy on your eyes

Oppo has decked the Find N5’s display with eye-comfort technologies

In recent years, a number of smartphone makers have started to take eye health more seriously. With how much of each and every day we spend glued to our mobile phone screens, tackling eye strain and reducing the risk of health problems down the road is an initiative that I’m strongly in favor of.

With the Find N5, Oppo has gone ahead and outfitted the device’s display panels with a number of eye protection measures and safeguards. The foldable’s 2160Hz Pulse Width Modulation (PMW) spec keeps flickering to a minimum, and dedicated Eye Comfort Tone and Bedtime Mode settings purport to reduce eye fatigue and dryness over time.

…the Find N5 has one of the least prominent creases of any book-style folding phone that I’ve come across.

As an added bonus, the Find N5 has one of the least prominent creases of any book-style folding phone that I’ve come across, anecdotally speaking. The crease is nearly unnoticeable with the display powered on, and running my finger over the center of the flexible panel has yet to take me out of my element or cause any distraction.

A Samsung folding OLED tablet half closed.

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It’s unlikely any of these wild display concepts will be implemented in a consumer device, but they sure are cool.

3 The Find N5 is a battery life champ

Oppo has outfitted the Find N5 with a Silicon-carbon battery pack, which comes with perks

The FInd N5 joins this year’s flagship smartphone trend in shipping with a Silicon-carbon battery pack, as opposed to the more traditional lithium-ion solution found in most phones in Western markets.

Oppo claims that the Find N5’s 5,000mAh power pack features 10 percent silicon content, for an improved energy density of 801Wh/L. While this latter term is too technical to mean anything to a battery layman like myself, the promise of 25 hours of continuous video streaming and spacious power capacity is impressive for a phone as thin and light as this one.

Better yet, the Find N5 is capable of speedy 80W wired and 50W wireless charging speeds, and Oppo is kind enough to provide a full-power AC brick in the box. I’m less enthused by the power adapter’s antiquated USB-A port and the Find N5’s lack of Qi2 magnetic charging compatibility, but there’s always next year.

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4 The Find N5 plays nice with Mac computers

A new Mac remote control feature makes Oppo’s latest foldable a great fit for Mac users

O+ Connect

O+ Connect is a tool that enables you to transfer your files and wirelessly control your Apple Mac via a compatible Oppo phone, such as the Find N5.

Alongside the launch of the Find N5, Oppo has released an all-new utility that promises to make cross-ecosystem interoperability less of a sticking point. O+ Connect is built into the foldable, which allows you to mirror or wirelessly cast your Apple Mac screen onto your N5.

Of course, setting up the feature isn’t frictionless — it requires you to download the O+ Connect app onto your Mac, as well as step through several macOS permission hoops. I haven’t had the chance to test out the feature first-hand quite yet, but I’m excited to put it through its paces.

…the ability to remote control your Mac via the Find N5 is technically impressive, and potentially a game-changer.

In any case, the ability to remote control your Mac via the Find N5 is technically impressive, and potentially a game-changer if all goes smoothly (and Apple doesn’t intervene in any way). Oppo says that a Windows version of the feature is also on the way, but for the time being, the macOS app can be downloaded from the phone maker’s web portal.

4 reasons foldable phones are actually stronger than you think

Technological progress is narrowing the durability gap.

5 The Find N5 is more ruggedized than its contemporaries

The phone’s IPX9 water resistance rating is a first for the foldable form factor

One of the more blink-and-you’ll-miss-it features of the Oppo Find N5 is its official IPX6, IPX8, and IPX9 water resistance certifications. Without any discernible compromise to the externals of the device, Oppo has managed to craft what is the most water-tight foldable on the market.

The company says that, under controlled laboratory conditions, the Find N5 is capable of withstanding splashes of water, submersion in still water at a depth of 4.92 feet (1.5 meters) for 30 minutes, and 30-second water jet sprays at 176-degrees Fahrenheit (80-degrees Celsius) temperatures from various defined angles.

Of course, the Find N5 is still a smartphone with a foldable display, and with that comes inherent durability concerns. The unit’s inner display is as soft and susceptible to scratches as ever, and, as with every other foldable out there, dust, sand, and other debris are the N5’s primal weakness.