If early smartphone market trends are anything to go by, 2023 is going to be the year of foldable smartphones. In this segment, South Korean electronics maker Samsung has been the dominating smartphone brand to date due to lack of competition – especially in India. It is set to change with other smartphone brands soon joining the race. Among the first is the Chinese smartphone maker OPPO, which is set to bring to India its maiden clamshell design-based smartphone named Find N2 Flip.
Design
The OPPO Find N2 Flip is a visual treat, especially in astral black colour variant (review unit). The smartphone has Corning Gorilla Glass 5 protection on the cover – both front and back – and polished aluminium frame. The glass cover has matte finish with silky texture for a comfortable in-hand feel. It is resistant to fingerprints and smudges.
Like other clamshell form factor-based smartphones, the OPPO Find N2 Flip has a dual-display design with bendable screen on the inside, supported by a horizontal hinge at the centre – dividing the smartphone into two equal halves. Hinge is pivotal in the foldable devices experience, and OPPO’s version is noteworthy for several reasons. From a design perspective, it fixes the issue of visible gap in the bendable screen (in folded state) that plagues the existing generation of flip smartphones in India.
Besides lifting the aesthetics, the neatly folded form factor provides some protection against dirt, dust, debris, and other particles ingress. This is important because the bendable screen is made of plastic-like material and it is susceptible to damages – if exposed to sharp elements. Important to note, however, the phone does not carry any official ingress protection rating.
As for the experience, the OPPO Find N2 Flip is comfortable to use and operate. It is easy to fold and unfold, but requires both hands for a smooth experience. Designed for right hand use, the phone has a fingerprint sensor embedded in the power button that is placed along with volume rocker keys on the right side of the frame. In the folded state, both the power button and volume rockers are easily accessible. In unfolded state, however, the volume keys are on a higher side and require some effort to access.
Display
The OPPO Find N2 Flip has two screens – a large 6.8-inch FHD+ AMOLED bendable screen of 120Hz adaptive refresh rate stretched in a tall 21:9 aspect ratio and a 3.26-inch screen cover screen. Starting with the main bendable screen, it is bright, vivid and responsive. Moreover, it has an anti-reflective film to reduce glare. Like other smartphones with bendable screens, the screen on the OPPO Find N2 Flip has a horizontal crease in the middle but it is not prominent and comes to notice only if you care to see it. Besides resulting in distraction free experience, the flat screen with no visible crease aid confidence with regard to longevity. OPPO said the screen was tested by TUV Rheinland in which the latter found the crease to remain imperceptible even after 216,000 folds.
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Durability details aside, the screen is good for reading vertical content and watching content developed in a wide aspect ratio. Therefore, the experience with regard to social media use and streaming videos available on OTT platforms such as Netflix, Disney+ Hotstar, and Amazon Prime Video is top-notch. OPPO has optimised some of its apps and third-party apps to optimise the content based on the fold degree. For example, the camera app shifts the viewfinder on the top half and camera interface on the bottom half when the phone’s screen is open in 90-degree. Most of such optimisations are available on other flip smartphones, but it is good to see the company not compromising on the fundamentals here.
A clamshell smartphone is incomplete without a second screen because not all operations require the efforts of opening and closing the flap.
The OPPO Find N2 Flip has one, and it is equally intriguing as the bendable screen. It is a vertical touchscreen on the cover with support for always-on display mode and widgets. The vertical form factor makes the screen feel natural to use. For example, there are nine quick toggles, swipe down from top to open, accessible right on the cover screen. Besides, the cover screen shows apps notification and allows quick replies for the supported messaging apps. Moreover, the swipe inward gesture (from the right) to access widgets elevates the experience. The cover screen is certainly better than other iterations of it available on competing smartphones, but it could have been better in terms of utility and touch response. In its current form, it seems underutilised.
Camera
The OPPO Find N2 Flip has a triple-camera system – a 50-megapixel primary camera sensor with optical image stabilisation and an 8MP ultra-wide-angle sensor available on the cover, and a 32MP sensor with autofocus on the mail screen.
While the imaging performance is modest with primary camera sensor lifting the experience in most cases, it is the new use cases enabled by foldable form factor that the OPPO Find N2 Flip has going for it. With the flip capable of holding position between 45-degree and 110-degree, there are many more camera angles one can cover that are otherwise difficult with bar form factor smartphones. Moreover, it is possible to use the primary camera system, both wide and ultra-wide-angle, for selfie shots, portraits, and videos – in both folded and unfolded states.
Performance
The OPPO Find N2 Flip is a flagship smartphone with a performance to match, thanks to MediaTek Dimensity 9000+ system on chip. It works fine in regular daily operations and the experience is so even with power-and-graphic intensive workloads. The phone’s 8GB RAM is on the lower side, especially for the power users, but it does not hamper the experience if you keep clearing the unused apps from running in the background and restart the phone once in a week. The phone has ample 256GB on-board storage, but this is all you got for storage needs because there is no slot for a microSD card.
The OPPO Find N2 Flip boots Android 13 operating system-based ColorOS 13 interface. Though customisable and feature rich, the interface is marred with bloatware. For example, there are two different stores to download apps – Play Store (default) and App store. Besides, there are folders such as ‘Hot Apps, Hot FreeGames, and Hot Games’. Many of these cannot be uninstalled from the system.
Battery
The OPPO Find N2 Flip is powered by a 4,300 mAH battery, supported by a fast 44W SuperVOOC wired charger. The phone’s on-battery time is modest, but better than smartphones of similar kind. The phone easily sails through a day on basic everyday use, but requires charging towards the end of day if used extensively. Thankfully, charging time is fast with the supplied charger – charges full from 20 per cent in less than an hour.
Verdict
OPPO might be late to launch its first foldable smartphone in India, but the Find N2 Flip is worth the wait. It is a thin (unfolded) and lightweight (191g) smartphone that punches above its weight in terms of performance and features. Its neatly packed design and useful vertical cover screen put it a notch above others in terms of aesthetics and utility. It would have been a flip smartphone to beat in 2023, if it had a better interface and utility attached to the cover screen. Nevertheless, the OPPO Find N2 Flip makes a solid entrant in India’s foldable smartphone market at Rs 89,999.
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