OPPO Find N2 Flip foldable product reviews

I first got involved with mobile phones back when they were still shoulder-mounted behemoths, powered by a car battery slung on a strap that you had to lug with you everywhere. I never owned one, but I did get a lot of hands-on time with the technology due to a family connection with a major telco that was at the forefront of cellular-network technology in NZ. Because of that, I have always enjoyed owning a flip-phone, despite the design's somewhat tenuous durability at times. That's probably a hang-over from watching a lot of Star Trek as a kid. Naturally, when keypads and tiny screens got replaced by full touchscreens, the ability to fold the phone in half became somewhat more problematic for the engineers, since at the time almost all touchscreens were built on a substrate of Corning Gorilla Glass - not exactly famous for its ability to bend and fold without shattering.

There is no denying that OPPO was a bit late to the foldable scene, with their first foray - the Find N - proving to be somewhat 'more of the same' so it was interesting to note the release of the N2 Flip - their first clamshell offering and, I have to say, a very credible first entry into this small a form-factor. That's not to say it's free from flaws though. Thankfully, the majority of the ones that affect my own usage-scenarios are issues with the software. Because of that, I won't focus too much on that side of things, since the phone has already had 1 major and 1 minor update since I received the loan unit, which has fixed a couple of the niggles by the time I write this. Keeping that in mind, I feel it a bit premature to rag on the apps, or lack thereof, until the ColorOS 13 platform has undergone more adjustments for this hardware, and unlocks more of the key features I would use... the majority of which are in the camera app.

This phone comes in two colourways - Astral Black and Moonlit Purple. I got the Purple model as my test unit, and I can't help but wish I had got the Black instead... and that isn't about the colour, it's about the finish. Astral Black comes in a matte-finish nano-textured finish, while the Moonlit Purple has a smooth, slick finish that I found almost impossible to hold on securely to if my hands got even slightly damp. In all honesty, I got very nervous about testing this one on a recent trip to Wellington, because it was a loaner and I couldn't afford to replace it. I should explain that a bit more - During the time I was in Wellington, there was ample fog, high humidity, rain and even some hail... all while I was out-and-about testing the phone in various conditions and usage scenarios. Now, since this unit has no official water-/dust-proof IP rating, I didn't want to risk drowning it, so it did spend a lot of time tucked away in three layers of drybags.

One of the first things you will note, upon seeing this handset for the first time, is the front screen. When the phone is folded shut, the front screen takes up almost 70% of the space, leaving only a small stripe up the side to hold the two main front cameras, the light sensor and the flash. This screen can be used to interact with the phone in its closed state to a degree I haven't seen before. There are a lot of things you can do with your device when it is folded shut, but in many ways, I feel that OPPO has not yet fully 'let themselves go for it' when it comes to seeing how much functionality they can pack in. You can check and read short notifications and even respond to some, as well as read and reply to text messages. Now, when I say "reply" I do mean reply, but you are limited to some predefined responses - basically monkey-push-button replies. You can write and set your own, but only through the device's main screen since there are on-screen keyboards I can even imagine, that would be viable on the front screen. Not with my sausage-fingers at least. That said, the apps and widgets that come preinstalled are varied in terms of function and genre, giving you plenty to explore and more to come as new updates bring new abilities and apps.

The biggest hit for this front screen, other than the added space for text, is the ability to use it as a viewfinder in selfie-modes. Being almost the same ratio as the main screen, you get a near-as-it-can-be preview of what your final image will look like, right there where you need it. Sure, all phones these days have a selfie-mode with a rear-facing camera... which is usually of a lower quality and resolution than the main front-facing ones. Factor in that most 'normal' phones don't have a front screen at all, and you start to see why this is quite a radical advancement in the style of foldable phones. The only other phones I have seen that fold, all have nearly-square front-screens which, at best, offer you either a microscopic preview or one so heavily cropped you have no idea if the family members at the ends of the line are even in-frame or not! Having a real WYSIWYG viewfinder is, as every photographer and family-photo taker will attest, a real game-changer. Look for it on every other brand in the coming releases.

The "Elephant in the Room" has to be the hinge. This is, unarguably, the real heart of this device's entire raison d'etre and OPPO has pulled ahead of its competitors with what has to be the tidiest folder in the playground. Unlike the big-name competitors, OPPO's engineers have found a way to fold the screen so that both halves of the unit seal shut with no gap in the casing. It may or may not be waterproof, but the design has such a tight seal, I didn't notice any pocket-grit finding its way onto the screen while the phone was in my pocket... even while clambering through weed-choked pathways trying to find old war bunkers along the Miramar heads. Touted as an 'invisible crease', the screen does of course have a crease. In fact, it appears to have three - two down, one up in the middle. However, unlike its peers, the N2 Flip has far less extreme deflections on the surface of the screen, and they can be hard to see under normal outdoor lighting conditions. Your fingers will definitely feel the dimples as you slide over the fold area, but it doesn't get in the way of your usage and enjoyment.

OPPO rate the hinge, and screen in that area, to survive around 400,000 open-close fold operations, but realistically, there's no way for an average Joe like me to test that. What I can say is that at no point did it feel like the hinge was in trouble, was sticking or needed to be forced, or showed any signs of obvious fatigue in the parts. If anything, I felt the hinge needed to be stiffed up a bit more, since one of the selling points of this device is the selfie-cam operations that rely on the phone being partially-folded to some degree. Marketing materials say that the hinge should "stay" at 45, 90 and 135 degrees... but I had trouble keeping it stable at anything other than 90 degrees of fold. (and of course, 0 and 180: fully open and fully closed.) This tendency to want to open-up-flat made testing some of the selfie-cam features difficult, but in the end, it didn't take much McGyvering to come up with a laser-cut mount of my own design that allowed me to stand the phone on a small tripod base and lock the screen at almost any angle I wanted, thanks to a series of locking holes and pins. (Nope, no photo sorry. The design is too unique to give away.)

The main screen is AMOLED, has a 21:9 ratio and measures about 6.8" (17cm) across the diagonal. With a resolution of 2520x1080 it is technically classed as "Full HD", but because of the extra width, it is sometimes called Ultra-HD in error. It appears to have superior brightness/contrast (not surprising for AMOLED) and it is rated to handle the new HDR10+ specification. With that in mind, the clarity and vividness of colour images shot under good lighting conditions with the AI Enhancement turned on becomes a lot more understandable. It is worth noting that the screen has a somewhat semi-matte finish. Unlike 'regular' smartphones, where the screen is glass and covered with another thin sheet of glass as a protective barrier against scratches, grease and oil, the N2 Flip screen is obviously not made of glass. Glass doesn't fold happily, at least not when it is in a format that is transparent, so the Flip has a flexible polymer coating instead. This means that under bright outdoor lighting conditions, the screen can be somewhat impossible to see. Because this is a common issue with any emissive screen technology, that affects almost every smartphone to some degree, it's one that will undoubtedly get solved in time as new materials and production techniques evolve.

For now though, it is enough to oohh and aahh over the stunning performance this little baby packs under its shiny skin. Utilising the Dimensity 9000+ chipset from Mediatek, this unit has more than enough grunt to drive some serious gaming without getting so worked up you could fry eggs on it. Utilising a dynamic refresh rate response, the system can run the display as low as 1Hz for near-static images that don't require a lot of real-time processing, up to 120Hz for super-quick refreshes during high-speed gaming or movies. You don't even need to worry about setting it, it will automatically figure out the best refresh rate to give seamless viewing without overtaxing the hardware unnecessarily. Smartphones just got smarter!

Under good lighting, most users who enjoy snapping photos with their phone will delight at the results, however, all that glitters isn't gold. While their 50MP sensor gives you plenty of pixels to play with, the system does seem to do some odd processing to the raw data before displaying it as 'a picture' - some obvious AI enhancing smooths fine details into steaks or blank patches, where there should be more detail. In particular, the ultrawide-angle lens - which also doubles as the macro lens thanks to the laws of optics - imparts a considerable amount of edge distortion, giving you a somewhat fish-eye result that may ruin an otherwise excellent photo. Losing some crispness, thanks in part to the practice of pixel-binning, photos taken with the ultrawide can easily appear slightly out of focus, and any movement in the image becomes a lot more obvious. Now, this can lead to some very trippy images, that have an implied extra depth to them that seems to defy the eye, but if you are shooting for serious content, this is not going to be a popular side effect. Flipping that around, there is one aspect in which this ultrawide seems to beat out previous cameras I have tried - it seems to colour-match with the main sensor better than anything I have used in the past. That may be because of better digital preprocessing or better lens materials used by Hassleblad in this unit.

Now, as much as the camera "shines" in well-lit environments, the "night mode" on this unit felt somewhat less capable than my previous phone - the OPPO Find X5. I spent some time up in Auckland very recently and had the opportunity to wander around One Tree Hill at night. I took over 100 photos, and less than 20 of them were worthwhile. The most common point-of-failure was the inconsistent automatic light adjustment. I found that to get stars in the sky, I had to have a lit foreground, which ruined the theme of the photos without resorting to image manipulation and stacking to fake a tolerable HDR. With that said, the camera hardware is clearly capable so I can only assume it is something related to the AI software getting a bit discombobulated under certain conditions.

Briefly touching on the software in summary, the latest iteration of ColrOS, based on Android 13, has a lot of cool new features but in a stunning departure from normal protocols, this unit arrived with almost no bloatware preinstalled. I don't know who made 'the call' to go this way, but they deserve a pay rise, a trophy and a huge thank-you. Instead of filling the storage with extra apps not really relevant to the NZ marketspace, the phone instead relies on a lot of Google-default apps to handle the main datatypes. Now, it has to be noted that this unit ships with a known short-fall in functionality on the camera app - with most of the 'fancy' or 'technical' modes unavailable at present, so it is hard for me to take any particular stance on the software front. Still, what we got was good, so stay the course, OPPO.

One of the cool perks in this version is the ability to fine-tune icon styles to a huge degree, without needing to install 3rd-party launchers or theme packs. You can let the phone reset your colour scheme based on your chosen wallpaper, or go in and manually set them yourself - adjusting colour, shape, style, corner radius, etc. internally. For those who risk jailbreaking their handsets just to fully customise them... OPPO is clearly looking to meet you halfway at least. That's really the only point I feel needs to be raised regarding software at this stage, since many of the key issues I have with the ColorOS and OPPO-specific apps are easily patched, as has happened with past test units. (Which is one reason I held onto this unit for an extra month, to see if an update would come out that would add more functionality to the camera in particular.)

The only other critical point to address is the power. With OPPO somehow managing to shoehorn in one of the largest-capacity battery packs I have seen in a smartphone, at ~4200mAh, and yet still be able to bend in half, it was great to see that the unit supported the 44-watt SuperVOOC charge rates. However, here's the oddity - It came with a 67-watt charge adaptor, and the phone does indeed only charge at 44W so there's some odd throttling going on in the phone. Whether OPPO had a surplus of 67W adaptors for NZ, or this is a future-proofing measure and the phone may end up getting a software upgrade that allows it to soak up ergs even faster... I don't know. But what I do know is that this phone clearly has innards packed as tight as they can be because there wasn't even room to embed an induction coil in the shell so it could also AirVOOC and charge wirelessly. I often found myself simply plopping it down on the charging pad out of habit, and coming back to it the next morning to find it screaming that it is starving and I must feed it a hefty dose of fresh electrons or it would die on me. Yes, even though the battery is huge, the power usage under even the mildest conditions seems to chew through the charge faster than expected. I tested it for over a week carefully avoiding any use of Power Saver and Performance Mode, and found that even after a day of average usage, it would be down below 30% by day's-end. I never got a second day out of it, except when I charged it up and then left it alone.

Overall, I found myself really wanting to love this phone. Alas, while I did enjoy it, it is not one I would go out and spend big coin on. It has a lot going for it, and there will be plenty of people for whom it would be a serious contender for 'my next new phone' but until the software is brought up to par in the camera area, call me a stormtrooper, because this is not the device I am looking for. That said, my big bug-bear is a software issue and one that is likely to be addressed at some point. Even disregarding that, there were still small but fundamental flaws in the design that took the shine off it for me. Still... there is a lot of serious potential packed into this discrete, stylish little beauty. The hardware has plenty going for it, with a processor that is still new to the market but already making big waves in the industry. The ColorOS 13 interface has had some super-serious overhauling done to it and has become a UI that I really enjoy using, when I even think about it. It's so smooth and intuitive for me now after only a couple of months, that I use it almost on autopilot. For me, that's a seriously huge tick in a very important box. Would I go out and spend $1600 +/- on it, even if I had that budget? Nope, I would not. I'd consider it a good deal at $1g, and still affordable at $1200, but anything over that, and I would expect the full range of software to be at full-functionality right out of the box.