The Oppo Find N2 Flip is the folding flip phone we've been waiting for
The Galaxy Z Flip 4 is a great foldable, but the Oppo Find N2 Flip brings a few key welcome improvements that could transform the flip form factor.
➡️ The Shortcut Skinny: Poised to be the best flip phone
📱 Large 3.26-inch front screen transforms the usefulness of the flip form factor
💧 It’s made possible by the waterdrop hinge design, resulting in no crease
📸 Big front screen means you’ll use the two main cameras more for selfies
🔔 You can also read up to 6 notifications, access quick settings, and much more
🔋 It has the biggest battery and fastest charging of any flip phone
I love the Galaxy Z Flip 4. It’s one of the best foldable phones right now, it is vastly improved over previous generations, and Samsung has some nifty software tricks that make the experience great. However, the front display is only useful in limited scenarios, the battery life is questionable, and the cameras are… just ok.
While we can hope that Samsung will bring improvements to the Galaxy Z Flip 5, we don’t have to wait that long for a flip foldable that fixes a lot of these problems. Instead of Samsung, it’s Oppo, and today, it unveiled the new Oppo Find N2 Flip. I’ve used one for 24 hours and, so far, it’s ticking every box I could ask for.
Finally, a useful Cover Screen
The biggest improvement comes in the front display: it’s useful and usable. Moreover, it’s so obvious that this is the right way to do a front-facing cover display, it makes me wonder why Samsung didn’t do it.
Unlike the Motorola Razr 2022, every Galaxy Z Flip, and most other flip form factor foldable phones on the market, the Oppo Find N2 Flip features a large front-facing display that acts like a small Android phone. Think of the Palm or a mini version of a mini Android phone, and you have the front display on the Oppo Find N2 Flip. It’s the largest Cover Screen on any flip phone right now, and measures 3.26 inches with 900 nits peak brightness, and an ergonomically friendly 17:9 aspect ratio.
As soon as I unboxed it and set it up, it became clear that Oppo had nailed the usability of the form factor. The majority of phone users repeat a common set of tasks by unlocking the big screen on their phone throughout the day: checking the time, setting their phone to silent, turning off Wi-Fi, setting airplane mode, etc. You can do all of this without needing to use the main display, and this will likely result in much better battery life.
There’s more though: you can see up to 6 notifications at once and read them with ease, as well as reply to all of the common messaging apps including WhatsApp, Messenger, Slack, Telegram, and SMS. I use Slack a lot throughout my day, and being able to reply from the Cover Screen makes it far easier to respond to important messages in seconds, versus having to open the app and be distracted by things that don’t require immediate attention.
The Cover Screen also comes with useful widgets including seeing what the weather is going to be like, checking your calendar, setting the voice recorder or a timer, and of course, using the cover display as a viewfinder for selfies.
Dual camera and excellent form factor for photos
Talking of selfies, there is a 32MP front-facing camera when you open the main display, but the joy of a form factor like the Oppo Find N2 Flip is being able to use the main cameras for selfies when the phone is folded.
With a double press of the volume button, you can fire open the camera app and use either the 50MP main camera or the 8MP ultra-wide camera to take excellent selfies or group photos. I really enjoyed this part of the Galaxy Z Flip 4 experience, but the smaller display made it difficult to truly see how the photo was going to turn out – the Cover Screen on the Find N2 Flip makes this much easier, given the size and crucially, the aspect ratio which is almost the 16:9 aspect ratio found on most phones.
The main camera features an f/1.8 aperture and uses a Sony IMX890 sensor, while the ultra-wide has an f/2.2 aperture and a wide field of view. I’d love to see a flip form factor that also features a telephoto lens, but for now, it seems that all flip phones will stick to a wide-angle and ultra-wide-angle setup.
The camera is tuned in partnership with Hasselblad – who also features on the recently-announced OnePlus 11. This isn’t surprising given that Oppo is the parent company of OnePlus, and both are part of the BBK Group.
A flexible hinge and crease-less display
Most people are turned off by foldable phones because of the crease. Since the first Galaxy Fold was announced, I’ve had a lot of people ask me whether the crease is noticeable and a nuisance, and while it’s noticeable on Samsung devices, it’s something that you quickly forget about.
On the Oppo Find N2 Flip’s main display, the crease is almost invisible. I say almost because it’s still there, but only at very acute angles when reflecting light is it slightly noticeable. It’s the closest we’ve come to having a proper crease-less foldable display.
Oppo says this is made possible by its New Generation Flexion Hinge. That’s essentially a fancy marketing term to say that the company uses a different type of hinge design compared to other companies. This is the same hinge found in the original Oppo Find N foldable – which I thoroughly enjoyed using – albeit thanks to a smaller and lighter mechanism, the crease is 63% narrower making it virtually imperceptible.
How does the hinge work? While most foldable phones fold the display in a traditional U-shaped manner, Oppo has adopted a waterdrop pattern so it folds back onto itself. The result is that it reduces the impact – and therefore, the visibility – of the crease. Before the Oppo Find N2 Flip arrived, I doubted these claims, but the crease really is significantly less noticeable than other phones.
This also means the 6.8-inch LTPO E6 AMOLED display gets to shine, and this screen is a beauty. ColorOS has some clever animations – much like Motorola has on the latest Motorola Razr 2022 – that animate the wallpaper when you open or close the phone, and this is also on the Cover Screen, as well as the main display.
The main display offers a 120Hz adaptive refresh rate for smooth scrolling, a 21:9 aspect ratio that seems to be fairly common on this form factor, 1,600 nits peak brightness, and a 2520x1080 resolution which is effectively Full HD but extended for the slightly taller aspect ratio of the display. It’s a great screen, and the colors pop, making it a pleasure to use. The Anti-Reflection Film is meant to result in 5x less glare, although I haven’t used this for long enough to be sure.
Big battery and powerful specs
What makes me super excited about the Oppo Find N2 Flip is the battery. At 4,300mAh it’s larger than any other foldable in this form factor which, coupled with the expected benefits of using the smaller Cover Screen for daily tasks versus the main display – should mean that it offers excellent battery life.
Oppo claims a lot of engineering feats have allowed it to pack this battery size into a device that doesn’t have a gap in the hinge when folded, and it also says that the battery density is 10% larger than traditional battery cells. The company also claims that the additional battery capacity offers 1 hour more video calling, 2 hours more social media, or 5 hours more music playback, compared to other flip phones.
Oppo and the rest of the BBK group are also known for superfast charging, and the Oppo Find N2 Flip offers the fastest charging of any flip phone at 44 watts when wired. For comparison, as explained in our Galaxy S23 Ultra review, Samsung’s new flagship only offers 45W charging, while the OnePlus 11 offers 80W and several phones offer 100W+ charging speeds. The aptest comparison is the Galaxy Z Flip 4, which only offers 25W charging. Oppo says the fast charging should offer a 50 percent charge in just 30 minutes, with a full charge taking less than an hour, but we’ll reserve judgment on this for the full review.
The rest of the phone is packed full of the usual powerful specs we’ve come to expect. There are dual 5G SIM card slots – although one is disabled when you add an eSIM as it can only support two active connections at once – there’s 360-degree NFC, and a new three-antenna layout. The latter means that whether the Find N2 Flip is open or closed, contactless payments will work, although we haven’t been able to test whether this works yet.
The entire package is powered by the MediaTek Dimensity 9000+ chipset, built on the TSMC 4nm process, and comes with 8GB of RAM as well as 256GB of UFS 3.1 storage. It runs on ColorOS based on Android 13 and seems to be fast and fluid, although I’ll reserve judgment until the full review.
The Oppo Find N2 Flip likely won’t be available to buy in the USA but should be available in many global markets in the coming months, with exact pricing and availability to be revealed. It comes in two colors: the Astral Black model I’ve been testing, and a Moonlit Purple version that looks fantastic in the official photos.
Stay tuned for our full Oppo Find N2 Flip review, as well as all the other foldable phones being launched this year.