Oppo Find N2 Flip review

Samsung’s Galaxy Z Flip has long reigned (well, for a couple of years) the king of the foldable clamshell phone. But now, with the European launch of the Oppo Find N2 Flip, it may finally have to give up that crown.

Oppo’s first flip phone – and third foldable overall – takes closely after Samsung’s latest Z Flip 4. But an improved hinge, more capable camera, and larger cover display make this a more practical option for most, helped by a more affordable £849 price tag – at least in the UK.

The Z Flip 4 still has the edge on software, and a certain je ne sais quois visual flair, but the gauntlet has been laid down – and Samsung has a lot of work to do to impress with this year’s Galaxy Z Flip 5.

Design & build

• Compact clamshell design
• Hinge closes completely
• No water-resistance rating

Set aside the cover screen – we’ll get to that – and the Oppo Find N2 Flip looks an awful lot like Samsung’s Galaxy Z Flip 4. I guess that either imitation is the best form of flattery, or this is the only way to make the flip design work right now.

The Oppo is about the same size – only a little larger – with a similarly sized 6.8in screen when open, that closes in half to form a perfect little square with its cameras down in one corner.

Where Oppo has a clear edge is its hinge. This upgraded ‘Flexion’ hinge uses a waterdrop shape at the hinge, which allows the screen to fold completely shut with no gap – and reduces how obvious the screen’s crease is in the process.

We’ve seen this before in a few bigger foldables, not to mention Huawei’s P50 Pocket flip phone, but it’s a trick Samsung hasn’t managed yet. The result is a phone that feels much sturdier than its main rival, with a solidity that both protects the device from dust and adds a premium feel.

It closes in half to form a perfect little square

One minor downside is that the hinge can only hold the screen open up to 110-degrees – so a touch past the vertical point. That’s enough for most use cases, but the Z Flip 4 will stay put when you bend it further, and at times during video calls I found myself missing that extra literal flexibility.

Another area where Oppo lags behind is that the Find N2 Flip has no IP rating for dust and water-resistance. The Z Flip 4 is IPX8-rated – meaning good water-resistance, but no official dust protection – but the Oppo has no such rating. The company says the phone can survive splashes of rain and the like, but you might feel nervous whipping it out in the bath.

Of course, durability specs matter up to a point, but the proof is in the pudding – nowhere more so than with foldables. Oppo’s first gen Find N is only a little over a year old, and never launched outside China, so no one has a good sense of how long these things last. You do at least get a simple plastic case included in the box.

For all of Samsung’s improvements, there are still plenty of stories of Flip and Fold 4 units failing less than twelve months in, and anyone buying a foldable should go in with a degree of caution: only buy one if you can afford for it to break.

While the Find N2 Flip has a gold edition in China, where it first launched in late 2022, the global edition comes in a choice of black or purple. My black model has a slightly grippy, textured finish to the glass body that I’m a big fan of, with a subtle sparkle, while the purple is glossier – a shame, since I otherwise prefer that colour.

If you want to compare them directly, I have to admit I prefer the two-tone flair of Samsung’s flip phone, which makes the Oppo aesthetic feel bluntly functional by comparison, but I can’t deny this is well put together piece of hardware that feels as slick as anything out there.

Screen & speakers

• Large 3.26in cover screen
• Bright and matt inner screen
• Decent stereo speakers

There are two screens to the Find N2 Flip, and funnily enough the one that doesn’t fold is arguably the more interesting.

The 3.26in cover display on the phone’s exterior is much larger than you’ll find on any other flip phone right now – whether Samsung, Huawei, or Motorola. In fact, trace your phone history back and you’ll find it’s technically a larger screen than was on the first ever Android smartphone, the HTC Dream – and only a fraction more compact than the first-gen iPhone.

It also stands out thanks to the portrait orientation, which Oppo says was a deliberate choice to improve usability. That’s most obvious when you use that outer screen as a camera viewfinder for selfies – suddenly it’s in the same orientation as the camera itself – but also feels more natural when flicking through notifications, scrolling your calendar, or checking the weather.

It’s technically a larger screen than was on the first ever Android smartphone

Of course, you’ll spend more time using the inner screen, which at 6.8in is remarkably similar in size and feel to Samsung’s offering. It’s an LTPO AMOLED panel with 1-120Hz dynamic refresh rate, so delivers top visual quality, but with an extra edge: Oppo has added a matt, anti-glare finish that both looks fantastic and makes the phone easier on the eyes.

Reading off this almost feels like an eReader at times, and from a visual element alone I’ve actually come to prefer this display to the shiny glass slabs on most other phones. Though as the surface you interact with is plastic, it does pick up grease and fingerprints.

There is still a small crease of course, but it’s a subtle one: you can only spot it when looking at an angle, not head-on (which is how you’ll normally use the phone of course). You can feel it, but less so than on most foldables, and it’s quickly forgotten after a few hours with the phone.

I’ve also been pleasantly surprised by the stereo speakers included here, which are punchier than you’d think given how slight the whole phone is. Don’t get me wrong, these are still phone speakers, with all the limits that entails, but they get the job done.

Specs & performance

• Powerful MediaTek chipset
• 256GB storage by default
• Wobbly Bluetooth range

Oppo has equipped the Find N2 Flip with MediaTek’s Dimensity 9000+ chipset. That’s not the absolute latest flagship chip, but it’s still less than a year old and plenty powerful for most purposes. 

Day-to-day performance is smooth and fluid, with no stutter or slowdown in sight, and there’s enough horsepower to game and take full advantage of that 120Hz display.

This isn’t the absolute most powerful phone around – and it’s worth noting that both Samsung and Motorola’s alternative flips are a little more powerful – but only extremely demanding gamers or power users are likely to find anything to moan about.

The Flip has 8GB of RAM, which is fairly standard, but adds a more generous non-expandable 256GB of storage by default – double Samsung’s base storage for the Flip. There are no options to add more storage though, so that’s all you get.

Naturally 5G is supported, along with the usual array of Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. I’ve found the Bluetooth frustrating though – the range seems to be limited, meaning I get interference and signal drops on my headphones even when the phone is in the front pocket of my jeans. That’s not a problem a modern phone should ever suffer from, and is the biggest blemish to the overall user experience I’ve found.

One great touch is that the phone includes ‘360-degree’ NFC, meaning you can use the phone to make contactless payments from just about any angle when it’s closed. 

This only works for certain payment types, like entering London’s public transport system, so you’ll still need to open the phone fully to pay in a shop or restaurant, but it’s a convenient time-saver when it does kick in.

Camera & video

• Surprisingly capable main camera
• So-so ultrawide
• Average selfie camera – but you don’t need it anyway

Camera quality was long held up as one of the key flaws of Samsung’s Flips, and while that was improved in last year’s Z Flip 4, Oppo has still found room to one up its Korean rival.

That isn’t to say that the Find N2 Flip’s camera is one of the best around – but it’s better than before, and the main camera at least is comfortably at flagship level, even if it lacks the versatility of slab flagship camera systems.

That main lens is a 50Mp, f/1.8 shooter using a Sony IMX890 sensor – the same one found in the recent OnePlus 11. It’s capable of some really beautiful shots, with punchy and vibrant colours that are sometimes a little over-saturated but don’t veer too far away from being true-to-life.

My biggest surprise was the quality of photos at night

The sensor is big enough to even create a slight natural bokeh effect in shots, with a really attractive depth of field. Photos also hold up well when you jump into the camera app’s default 2x zoom, with little loss of detail – though at times the colour tuning does shift as you zoom.

My biggest surprise was the quality of photos at night – the Find N2 Flip manages impressively deep dynamic range, varying light sources are handled carefully, and for the most part dark spots remain dark, but detailed – though it does fall victim to the common problem of over-brightening the night sky.

The 8Mp ultrawide is much less impressive, but still welcome as an extra option. It doesn’t handle lowlight well, but in good lighting photos are serviceable – just expect flatter colours and a serious drop in detail.

Then there are selfies. You can use the 32Mp punch-hole camera on the phone’s folding screen to take selfies, and results aren’t bad at all – better than most out there. 

I’m a little surprised it’s so good, because Oppo’s clear pitch is actually that you should save this camera for video calls and the like, and instead use the cover display and main camera to take selfies instead.

This is slightly more fiddly – as big as the outer display is, it’s still a fraction the size of the main screen – but the portrait orientation makes it easy enough to frame yourself, and the main camera is an excellent option for selfie shots, a step up even further from the dedicated camera on the interior.

Battery & charging

• All-day battery life
• Fast wired charging
• No wireless charging

Battery is the other area where early flip phones struggled, and Oppo clearly wanted to avoid learning that lesson the hard way.

With that in mind, it’s equipped the Find N2 Flip with a 4300mAh battery – far from the biggest around, but within the same realm as modern flagship slab phones.

Over a week with the phone I’ve found it typically lasts all day, so long as I don’t push it too hard. A two-hour video call was enough to tank the battery early and force an evening charge, but if I stuck to Spotify, social media, and web browsing then I usually ended the day with 20-30% left in the tank.

In case you do need to run for a plug socket, the company has thrown in fairly fast charging. On paper the 44W wired speed is substantially faster than either Samsung or Motorola offers, but in my test it was only enough to restore 59% of the battery in half an hour – the exact same as the Razr 2022, and only a little faster than Samsung’s phone.

That would be OK, but the trade-off you make for that very slightly faster charging is that there’s no wireless charging included at all. I personally find the flip phone format perfectly suited to dropping onto a Qi charger and glancing at every now and then, so I do really miss the option, and don’t find the wired offering fast enough to make up for the loss.

Software & updates

• Plenty of widgets and options for the cover screen
• Foldable features aren’t quite as smooth as Samsung’s
• Long-term software support promised

There’s good and bad to the software side of the Find N2 Flip. 

Let’s start with some good: overall I think Oppo’s ColorOS skin (here laid on top of Android 13) is one of the better options around. It’s packed with customisation options, keeps bloatware and ads light, and best of all it rarely seems to get in the way of me actually using the phone.

I’m also impressed with how much the company has built into the cover display. Some of the options are standard: an always-on display, weather and alarm widgets, and basic camera controls so you can take selfies with the main camera.

You can set a wallpaper from your own image, but better is the set of interactive pets. Pick from a dog, cat, bird, hamster, or rabbit, and you’ll get a little furry or feathered friend who lives on your cover display and spends their time reading, listening to music, or dozing off.

Interactivity is limited to a quick tap to change what they’re up to, but that’s probably for the best – you get all the good bits of a modern Tamagotchi without the all-consuming stress that you’ll accidentally kill them off.

What annoys me is that for all the promise of this larger cover screen, there’s an occasional lack of polish that gets in the way.

Most annoying is the fact that when closed it’s rubbish about recognising orientation. While Samsung clearly decided there was a ‘correct’ orientation to the Z Flip 4 when shut, Oppo wants to have it both ways, letting you use the phone hinge-up or hinge-down. But half the time it can’t tell which way it’s turned, leaving you looking at an upside-down notification or a hamster dancing on its head.

I think part of the problem here is the camera. Hold the phone in the obvious way – i.e. ready to flip open – and the lenses are at the bottom right, which creates an awkward angle for photos. Turning it upside down – as the camera widget actually suggests – gives you better framing, but all of a sudden it’s not ready to open.

I don’t know what the elegant solution here is, and Oppo’s setup would probably work better if the phone was just a little better at knowing which way up it is. It’s so almost there that these little nuisances both you more than you think they might.

Let’s end on a good note though: Oppo has caught up to the competition and is now promising four years of ColorOS feature updates together with a fifth year of security patches, a match for Samsung and one up on Google.

That means that in theory this should be supported all the way through to Android 17, with security protection into 2028, so you should be able to rely on this for years to come – so long as the hardware holds up too.

Price & availability

If you’re in the UK, the biggest draw of the Find N2 Flip may well be the price tag: the £849 ticket price is a full £100 cheaper than Samsung’s latest, and £210 cheaper than that phone’s equivalent 256GB storage model (though of course you may now find that phone a little below asking price if you shop around).

It’s even the exact same price as a new iPhone 14 – and that phone doesn’t even fold or nuthin’.

In the UK you can buy the Find N2 Flip direct from Oppo, from Amazon, or from major networks, Carphone Warehouse, or stores like Currys.

In Europe the difference is less stark, where the €1,199 retail price is actually pricier than the Z Flip 4, and a direct match for its 256GB variant.

In either market it’s a close price match for the Motorola Razr 2022, but beats that phone in overall look and feel.

Sadly the US won’t get the Find N2 Flip at all – Samsung can rest easy there for now – and the bigger book-style Find N2 won’t launch outside China at all.

Check out our full guide to the best Android phones for more options, or the best Oppo phones for more from the company.

Verdict

The Oppo Find N2 Flip is a pretty astonishing phone – and I say that as a dyed-in-the-wool Z Flip fanboy.

I still think Samsung’s phone looks slicker, and the combo of smoother software, waterproofing, and wireless charging means that at the same price I’d give the Z Flip 4 the edge.

But, in the UK at least, they’re not the same price – and when you can save £100-200 on the Oppo option, it’s hard to beat. Those minor gripes are easy to live with, and the improved camera, faster charging, and gapless hinge give this a few advantages that could well win you over outright.

Right now, this is an excellent flip phone, and the best value one around. If Oppo can match Samsung’s polish, then next time it around it might just be the best – full stop.

Specs

• 6.8in, 120Hz AMOLED internal display
• 3.26in, 60Hz cover display
• MediaTek Dimensity 9000+
• 8GB RAM
• 256GB storage
• 4300mAh battery
• 44W wired charging
• Cameras:
  • 50Mp, f/1.8 main camera
  • 8Mp, f/2.2 ultrawide camera
  • 32Mp, f/2.4 selfie camera
• 166.2 x 75.2 x 7.5mm (unfolded) or 85.5 x 75.2 x 16mm (folded)
• 191g
• Android 13 with ColorOS 13