The Oppo Find N5 is the slickest foldable yet
A make-or-break moment for folding phone design?
The Oppo Find N5 feels like a make-or-break moment for folding phone design. If this isn’t the one to sell the concept, what could be?
It is genuinely difficult to imagine where significant foldable hardware improvements could come from in the future. Could this phone be thinner? Maybe not if you want it to have a USB-C port. Lighter? It’s already within two grams of an iPhone 16 Pro Max. Has the crease gone? Well, almost.
When you unbox the Find N5, your first thought will probably be “wow, that is a thin phone”. It’s 4.21mm thick when opened up, making it the thinnest phone on the market as far as I’m aware. Just as importantly, though, your first thought after closing the Find N5 will be “wow, that’s a normal phone”.
Even more so than the Find N3 or Pixel 9 Pro Fold, both of which made solid attempts to provide a decent traditional smartphone experience, the Find N5 really does just feel like a very nice phone before you open it up.
The compromises are minimal. The corners are very slightly squared-off on the left side of the 6.62” screen, due to the hinge, and that’s about it. It’s 8.93mm when folded, making it the first foldable phone to crack the 9mm barrier. It doesn’t feel meaningfully different in my hand to an iPhone 16 Pro Max or a Pixel 9 Pro.
The Find N5’s inner OLED display is the biggest on any foldable, unless you count Huawei’s decadent tri-fold Mate XT. At 8.12” across, it’s a little taller than the Find N3’s, but it’s wide enough to preserve usability in both folded and unfolded states. It looks great, reaching a peak outdoor brightness of 1,400 nits.
That is not quite enough to fully disguise the crease, which Oppo describes as “almost invisible” — but in most other situations the crease really is not very visible at all. It’s also much shallower and narrower than on other phones, making it less of an annoyance when you swipe across the centre of the screen.
This is thanks to Oppo’s new titanium alloy hinge design, which the company says is 26% smaller but with 36% higher rigidity. The Find N5 is also claimed to be 70% more shock resistant and is certified for IPX6, IPX8, and IPX9 water resistance, with the screen and hinge tested for 100,000 fold-unfold cycles.
The internal specs are what you’d expect in 2025: Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite, 16GB of RAM, 512GB of storage. Oppo is using silicon-carbon batteries in a foldable for the first time, though — after the technology showed up on the Find X8 Pro — meaning it’s been able to cram 5,600mAh of capacity into the slim frame.
Oppo’s included wired brick can charge the Find N5 at up to 80W, with a full charge from 0% taking a little under 50 minutes. Surprisingly, the company also made room to add wireless charging by using a thin custom coil. Proprietary chargers work at up to 50W, and Oppo is selling magnetic charging cases that should be compatible with MagSafe and Qi2 pads at slower speeds.
Something had to give with the Find N5 hardware, and unsurprisingly it’s the element that relies the most on physical depth: the cameras. On paper, the Find N5 is a downgrade across the board when compared to the N3.
The main camera moves from a 48-megapixel 1/1.43” sensor to 50 megapixels at 1/1.56”, while the periscope telephoto has shrunk from 60 megapixels at 1/2” to 50 megapixels at 1/2.75”. The ultrawide appears to be the biggest compromise, meanwhile, going from a 48-megapixel 1/2” sensor to an 8-megapixel part that Oppo isn’t even providing the size for.
I haven’t yet had the chance to do exhaustive comparative testing, though it is at least clear that the Find N5 benefits from Oppo’s excellent image processing and colour science, particularly in Master mode. You can't expect the depth and detail from Oppo’s own Find X7 Ultra, though.
One quirk of this camera system is that the main camera actually has an unusually wide 21mm-equivalent focal length, which most photographers would have considered ultrawide itself before the popularisation of smartphones. In practice, I’d expect to relegate the 8-megapixel ultrawide to “emergency” use or video situations where pure photographic image quality is less important than just getting everything in the scene.
It’s also worth noting that the telephoto camera has gained close-focusing tele-macro capability, which makes for a better macro option than most other phones that use their ultrawide lenses. This is the first time Oppo has supported tele-macro on any phone, and it makes the 8-megapixel ultrawide feel like even more of an afterthought.
I need to use this phone more to issue a proper real-world verdict on the cameras. From the specs, though, it’s clear who Oppo is targeting with the Find N5: people who like the idea of folding phones but have been turned off more by their clunky design than their camera quality in the past. Slab phones are always going to have an advantage in the camera department, so I think it makes sense to optimise folding phones for the things they can be best at — namely, the experience of using the inner screen.
Oppo already did a pretty good job with the software on the Find N3, particularly with the Boundless View multitasking system that lets you zip around near-full-screen versions of multiple apps at once. That’s been tweaked on the Find N5 with more prominent controls for adding new apps or changing their window size, which should help new users learn the interface — it did take me a while to get used to how Boundless View worked on the Find N3.
Oppo has also added Mac support to its O+ Connect service, which previously worked with iPhones and iPads. This is honestly kind of a wild app, giving you full control over your Mac’s screen through a mini laptop-style remote interface complete with multi-touch trackpad, while on the Mac end you get seamless file transfer and document editing across the phone and computer. Oppo also plans to update the Find N5 to make Mac files directly accessible in the phone’s Files app.
I don't think I’ve ever seen anything quite like this on Android. Mac interconnectivity is half the reason I buy an iPhone every year, and if the final software works as well as promised, it could make me rethink that premise.
So yeah, I am pretty enamoured with the Find N5 so far. The Pixel 9 Pro Fold was my favourite phone of last year, and this smokes it on every level other than not being a Pixel. Which, granted, is a big point in the 9 Pro Fold’s favour, but Oppo has its own software advantages as well.
Like I said at the start, it’s hard to imagine foldable hardware getting a whole lot better than this. The main question for me as I continue to use the Find N5 will be this: am I getting enough out of the inner screen to justify the inevitable trade-off in camera quality?
Because at this point, I think that is the only serious trade-off. It’s not “can I put up with a less durable, clunkier device that’s much thicker than normal phones but has a weird crease in the screen and a small battery and worse cameras”. It’s really now just “can I put up with worse cameras”.
The rest of the hardware is right there.