The Oppo Find N6 aims to solve folding phone screens once and for all

Behold the 'Zero-Feel Crease'

Oppo’s Find N5 was my favourite folding phone of last year, pushing the boundaries of thinness and design; I still use it a year on. And now Oppo has announced the follow-up — or at least the tech behind its inner screen.

I’ve been using the Find N6 for a while, but the full reveal and review isn’t until next week. What I can tell you about today is that inner panel, with which Oppo claims it has solved one of the major pain points behind folding phones: the crease.

Yes, Oppo said much the same thing last year, dubbing the Find N5’s crease “almost invisible”. That was true in most situations, but not all, and you could still feel the fault line when you ran your finger across the centre of the screen. But the Find N6 has what Oppo is dubbing a “Zero-Feel Crease”, and while “zero” is a strong claim, I’d say Oppo has got pretty close.

It’s not impossible to feel the crease on the Find N6, but you kind of have to make a point of doing so. In regular use with light touches, it’s more or less imperceptible. Next to the Find N5, which was already a leader in this regard, the difference is stark. Visually, too, the crease is less obtrusive than before, even when the screen is off.

Oppo says it has achieved this unprecedented degree of flatness by 3D-printing tiny liquid photopolymer droplets to fill in the imperfections inherent to each individual hinge mechanism, then solidifies it all with UV light. This is done 20 times to reduce height variance from what Oppo says is the industry-standard 0.2mm to just 0.05mm, resulting in a far smoother surface.

The hinge’s “waterdrop” design is 11% wider than on the Find N5, further reducing stress on the display and increasing the folding radius. Oppo also claims that its “Auto-Smoothing Flex Glass” will last much longer than other devices without developing a crease due to a 50% increase in thickness, nearly twice as much shape recovery and a 338% increase in deformation resistance.

The screen is certified by TÜV Rheinland to function for up to a million folds and is said to remain “exceptionally flat” through 600,000 of them. The phone also has IP56, IP58 and IP59 ingress protection against dust and water.

Not much of that, of course, is possible to test over the course of a couple of weeks. But I can say that the Find N6 is certainly the closest anyone has got to achieving a crease-free folding phone screen — even if “zero” is an exaggeration.

Stay tuned for more on the Find N6 next week.