Gadget review
Oppo Find N5: A brilliant foldable with a hefty price tag
Superb design and battery life can’t hide the brand’s uphill battle.
Top Line:
Oppo’s Find N5 is an excellent device overall: the display is superb, it’s quite compact and not too heavy for a device that unfolds into a tablet. You can use it comfortably even when folded, the large display is much more convenient for work, and the camera is very good.
However, not all apps make good use of the entire screen area when the phone is open, but when they do, the user experience is much more comfortable. Games are also far more enjoyable on a larger screen.
Its main drawback is the price: almost $2,500 - for a brand that many people still don’t know. For this price, you could buy a flagship device from Apple or Samsung and still have around $800 left over, but you’d have to give up the folding screen. Or, you could buy another foldable and still spend less, though you’d get a device that’s slightly heavier, thicker, and with a slightly smaller display.
In short, Oppo demonstrates impressive technical capabilities here, but at this price point, it will have a hard time convincing consumers to choose its product.
Details:
Just before Israel’s strike on Iran’s nuclear sites, Oppo’s Find N5 arrived in Israel, a foldable smartphone that opens up to the size of a small tablet. And not just any foldable, but the “world’s thinnest foldable,” with a thickness of only 4.2 mm when open. I recently reviewed the Galaxy S25 Edge, Samsung’s ultra-thin flagship, which now seems slightly less impressive with its 5.8 mm thickness. The question is how long Oppo will hold this title, since Samsung is about to launch a new generation of foldables soon.
The compact dimensions, which I’ll detail shortly, and the advanced features come at a steep price: the Find N5 costs almost $2,500. So what does it offer beyond its record thinness, and can it justify the high price? I put it to the test.
Structure and Design: The screen is large even when folded
One common problem with foldable phone-tablets is a narrow external screen, due to space constraints and the folding mechanism. This is not the case with the Find N5, even when folded, it offers a relatively large 6.62-inch screen, as wide as a standard smartphone. This is a significant advantage, letting you use the phone comfortably while folded without feeling like you’re sacrificing display quality.
Another plus: Even folded, the Find N5 is only slightly thicker and heavier than the Galaxy S25 Ultra or iPhone 16 Pro Max. Its weight is noticeable but still reasonable - in exchange, you get a device that opens into a small tablet with an 8.12-inch display.
On the right side you’ll find the power button, which also functions as a fingerprint reader, with the volume keys above it. When folded, there’s also a switch beside them to toggle silent mode; when opened, this switch shifts to the left side.
Compared with its main rival, Samsung’s Galaxy Fold, the Find N5 does well: it’s lighter (by about ten grams), significantly thinner when folded, and offers larger displays, both externally and in tablet mode. Samsung still has an advantage in one area: its device has basic dust protection, whereas the Find N5 lacks dust protection entirely, but it does have excellent water resistance, including submersion protection.
A late addition: Only after finishing this review did I realize I hadn’t mentioned the folding mechanism at all, which says a lot. Opening the device is a bit stiff at first, but the hinge feels sturdy and durable, and the fold between the screens is nearly invisible, only slightly noticeable by touch.
Hardware: Excellent display, fast charging
As expected from a flagship, the Find N5 uses a Snapdragon 8 Elite processor, the same top-tier chip found in other premium Android phones. The review unit came with 16 GB of RAM (with an extra 12 GB available as virtual memory) and 512 GB of storage.
With these specs, the phone handles any task easily, responds quickly, runs heavy games smoothly, and barely heats up under load.
Both displays are excellent: whether folded as a phone or opened as a mini tablet, you get a vivid, colorful, bright display. Even outdoors in direct sunlight, it remains easy to use.
The speakers are decent overall, but they’re not particularly loud and the sound isn’t especially impressive.
Powering it all is a 5,600 mAh battery, which easily lasts a full day. The included fast charger takes the battery from 15% to 50% in about 20 minutes, and to 100% in under an hour.
Software: Not all apps make full use of the big screen
The Find N5 runs Android 15 with Oppo’s ColorOS interface. Like most Android skins, it’s familiar and easy for any Android user to adapt to. By default, you navigate with swipe gestures instead of the three-button bar, but you can change this in the settings.
Apps appear on the home screen and in the app drawer — also customizable in settings.
There are built-in AI tools: in the Photos app you can auto-enhance images, delete objects or people, remove reflections, and more. The Notes app has an AI assistant to expand or condense your text, suggest templates, or tweak writing style.
Oppo’s smart sidebar, which also appeared in the previous model, adds more AI features depending on the app, like summarizing or reading out text in the browser.
When the phone is open, you can split the screen to run two apps side by side. Each app’s menu has a split view shortcut, and you can also open an app in a floating window to keep it on top. This is simple and useful for multitasking.
The problem is that not all apps are optimized for such a large display. Some just scale up awkwardly, filling the screen with oversized content. The browser has similar issues, displaying some websites like a desktop view that doesn’t always fit.
WhatsApp and Outlook, for example, do use the space well, with lists on one side and content on the other, but many apps, like Facebook Messenger, don’t. So despite the foldable form factor, not all apps deliver a split-screen experience.
Games, however, are more fun on the bigger screen - simply enlarging the display improves the experience significantly.
Camera: Quality results with premium branding
Despite its thin profile, Oppo fit three rear lenses into the Find N5, which do protrude slightly. There’s a main 50 MP sensor, a 50 MP telephoto lens with 3x optical zoom, and an 8 MP wide-angle lens. There are also two selfie cameras, one on the outer screen and one on the inner screen, both 8 MP.
The lenses sit in a circular module on the back, very similar to the OnePlus design (both brands belong to the same parent company). Like OnePlus, Oppo uses the Swedish Hasselblad branding, offering premium filters and smart scene modes for tricky lighting, concerts, fireworks, silhouettes, and more.
Bottom line: the camera performs very well, day or night. Photos aren’t ultra-sharp and can show some noise or slight blur, but they maintain natural colors without excessive saturation.
When unfolded, you can shrink the camera preview to half the mini tablet’s display or show it on the external screen too, so your subject can see themselves before you snap the photo.
