Oppo Find N2 Flip review: is this flip phone a big flop?

There’s a lot riding on the Oppo Find N2 Flip. It’s a seriously high-profile smartphone release, as it goes directly up against Samsung’s currently all-conquering competitor, and comes in with a big, intriguing cover screen to really catch your eye.

Is it a contender, or has the Flip flopped when it should be out there shaking up this still-young space? Happily, it’s not a flop, but that doesn’t mean it’s an easy ride to compact folding phone stardom.

Oppo Find N2 Flip design

The Oppo Find N2 Flip is a clamshell folding smartphone, meaning its main screen is about the same size as a big non-folding device, but it folds in half to reduce the overall footprint, making it more compact. It’s made of glass and metal, has a pair of cameras, a fingerprint sensor in the power button, and a smooth, slippery back panel when folded up. It really does like to slide about on just about any surface.

At 191 grams and 7.45mm thick, the Find N2 Flip is a tiny bit thicker and heavier than its closest competitor, the Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 4, but the overall design is extremely similar. You won’t really notice the size and weight differences when holding the two side-by-side. We’re going to compare these two a lot in our review, as Samsung is almost synonymous with folding smartphones at the moment, making it the phone for Oppo to beat.

The Find N2 Flip’s curved glass leads to a slim metal chassis, and I’ve found there’s less to grip than on the Z Flip 4, making it slightly harder to open. It requires a firm grasp and a little more effort than the Samsung phone, which has big, flat sides. When you do open it, the motion is smooth and offers little resistance. It can be held at various angles to about 120 degrees, a feature that works best when using the camera, making different viewpoints and angles easier to achieve or for it to act as a tripod-like support.

Oppo says its Flexion “water drop” hinge — an update over the one fitted to the original Find N, and the same as the one fitted to the Oppo Find N2 — makes the no-gap fold possible, which sets it apart from the Galaxy Z Flip 4 by eliminating the space between the two sections when the phone is folded up. This should help keep some of the dust out from the screen when it’s folded up in your pocket, and there’s a small argument to be made that it’s more aesthetically pleasing this way too.

However, the Find N2 Flip is less durable than the Z Flip 4. It has a basic IPX4 rating, so it’s not dust resistant at all and only has a basic level of water resistance, which is unfortunate next to the Z Flip 4’s IPX8 rating. Samsung has also put a lot of effort into making the flip phone more durable overall with its Armor Aluminum material. Oppo claims the Flexion hinge has been tested to 400,000 folds, so there’s shouldn’t be any concern about it breaking over the device’s usable lifetime.

There are two colors available, Astral Black and Moonlit Purple. While I’m pleased to see a colorful option, it’s unfortunate Oppo chose purple, a color Samsung uses to promote the Z Flip 4 and likely somewhat influenced by its partnership with the K-pop group BTS. Of all the colors it could have chosen, it’s disappointing Oppo decided to copy Samsung here, rather than try to stand out on its own.

Oppo Find N2 Flip cover screen

The Find N2 Flip’s major unique feature is the big cover screen, which measures 3.26 inches. It’s far bigger than the Galaxy Z Flip 4’s, and the promise is for it to make the phone more useful when it’s closed. In reality, it’s a missed opportunity. It’s not like the Find N2 or Galaxy Z Fold 4, where you can use full Android and any app on the outer screen. Instead, it’s limited to a series of widgets, just like the Z Flip 4. It’s just the screen is bigger and easier to see, but what you can do on it is severely limited.

You can reply to messages using canned responses, view your calendar, see the weather, and manage timers. The size does make it more useful as a secondary viewfinder for the camera, but this isn’t something you’ll use all the time. You can set the wallpaper to show an “interactive pet,” and while the pictures and animation are cute, calling them interactive is a stretch. You can tap them to change the pose, but that’s seemingly about it.

You can also adjust a few Quick Settings and view your notifications, but there’s no keyboard, so you have to open the screen to do anything other than read part of any email or message. Interacting with the screen can be long-winded, as it needs unlocking with your fingerprint or face recognition first, and neither is particularly fast. This is caused by the cover screen using the rear cameras for face ID, and they don’t always point at your face, The fingerprint sensor is also small and relatively flush to the side of the phone, and therefore hard to quickly locate.

The cover screen shows always-on information like the time and notification icons, has a 60Hz refresh rate, 900 nits of brightness, and can show a maximum of six lines of text in a message. It’s definitely preferable to have a larger cover screen, but without dramatically increasing functionality, it’s not as transformative as you may hope.

Oppo Find N2 Flip camera

Tuned by Hasselblad, the Find N2 Flip has a 50-megapixel main camera, an 8MP wide-angle camera, and a 32MP selfie camera at the top of the unfolded screen. Oppo’s MariSilicon X imaging chip takes care of the photography, while Hasselblad’s involvement concentrates on the software side and reproducing natural colors.

It’s best to ignore the 8MP wide-angle camera, as it’s a low-quality addition that you won’t want to use very often. The 50MP main camera is a Sony IMX890 which is also fitted to the OnePlus 11. Here, unfortunately, it does not seem to have optical image stabilization (OIS). This will be a problem in some low-light situations, but don’t worry too much, as the camera takes good photos in most environments.

Colors are bright and not too saturated, although I wouldn’t call them especially natural, and I appreciated the atmosphere captured by the main camera. There’s a 2x zoom mode with good consistency compared to the main camera. The portrait mode’s edge recognition is effective, and you can get in close to subjects without entirely losing focus. The poor wide-angle camera is a disappointment, plus in some main camera photos, there’s evidence of edge enhancement, suggesting the software is working hard behind the scenes.

The big cover screen comes into its own when you want to take selfies. It makes it easy to use the 50MP main camera, where you get more vibrant colors and greater detail than when you use the 32MP selfie camera, but it’s a shame all the controls remain on the main viewfinder screen rather than also showing up on the cover screen.

If you want to take photos of your adventures and friends, then sometimes share images on social media, the Find N2 Flip’s main camera will serve you really well. There’s not much versatility, though, with the 2x zoom quite restrictive compared to phones like the iPhone 14 Pro, and the wide-angle camera being much worse than the OnePlus 11’s. If you take a lot of selfies, the Find N2 Flip is a winner thanks to the combination of the main camera and big cover screen, and you won’t be disappointed.

Oppo Find N2 Flip performance and software

The Oppo Find N2 Flip is powered by a MediaTek Dimensity 9000+ processor and comes with 8GB of RAM and 256GB of internal storage space. It supports 5G and accepts two SIM cards, plus there’s NFC for mobile payments. The Dimensity 9000+ was announced in June 2022, and the Find N2 Flip gives the chip its highest-profile release yet. It runs Android 13 with ColorOS 13 software, which is viewed on the unfolded 6.8-inch, 120Hz main screen.

Oppo has really worked hard to minimize the unfolded screen’s crease. It’s barely noticeable through touch, and it’s practically invisible to the eye in most lights. The 21:9 aspect ratio makes the phone feel “normal” when unfolded and certainly makes the Z Flip 4 look quite pinched and small next to it. It’s bright enough to be seen outside in sunlight, and although the plastic bezel around it is noticeable, you do get used to it.

ColorOS 13 is less aggressive in its power management than before (until it gets to around 20% battery remaining, at least) and also sends fewer prompts about features you haven’t used or things it thinks you should do. It’s highly customizable, not always very logically laid out, but reliable and quite attractive. I’ve used the split-screen multitasking feature a few times, and it’s easy to activate.

There are still some irritations carried over from previous versions of ColorOS. For example, I don’t like the way it dumps all your apps on multiple home screens for you to clean up, it repeatedly prompts you to use the “magazine” wallpaper system, and every pre-installed system app seems to need an agreement to be confirmed before it works. These annoyances aren’t really present in Samsung’s One UI software.

Performance isn’t an issue for normal app use, such as messaging, social media, and GPS. However, I did notice some frame rate problems playing games. Asphalt 9: Legends noticeably jittered when the screen was very busy, even with the Pro mode active in ColorOS’s game mode. It doesn’t stop the game from being enjoyable, but it will frustrate people who are really serious about gaming.

Oppo Find N2 Flip battery

Inside the Find N2 Flip is a dual-cell battery with a capacity of 4,300mAh. The battery life is solid, but not outstanding. In our testing so far, the battery will last about one-and-a-half days before it needs a recharge. That’s with moderate use, or around four to five hours of screen time, without playing games.

While it’s not outstanding battery life for non-folding phones, the Find N2 Flip’s battery does beat our experience with the Galaxy Z Flip 4, which has a smaller capacity battery and rarely makes it past a full day of use. Oppo had an engineering challenge on its hands to get a larger battery inside the slim and light phone and utilized a clever split dual-cell design, along with changes to the placement of the SIM tray and connections for the power socket.

It’s recharged using Oppo’s included 44W SuperVOOC wired charger. Expect it to go from almost flat to 100% in 60 minutes. This is fast compared to the Galaxy Z Flip 4, which makes do with Samsung’s comparatively slow 25W wired charging, but it’s not as speedy as other versions of SuperVOOC found on phones like the OnePlus 11. The phone does not have wireless charging, a feature that’s standard on the Samsung flip phone.

Oppo Find N2 Flip price and availability

The Oppo Find N2 Flip is getting a global launch but is unlikely to include North America. The phone will be sold in the U.K., where it will cost 849 British pounds, which converts over to around $1,027. This is a very strong price, as the Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 4 costs 1,000 pounds in the U.K.. This means it also significantly undercuts the iPhone 14 Pro and the Galaxy S23 Plus, which are good alternatives to the Find N2 Flip, and comes close to matching the OnePlus 11 and the Google Pixel 7 Pro.

All these phones have superior cameras, great designs, and especially the iPhone and Pixel phones, much better software too, but they don’t fold up. This is the Find N2 Flip’s not-so-secret weapon, and makes its main challenger the Galaxy Z Flip 4. Motorola has recently released the Razr (2022), though, which has a 2.7-inch cover screen and the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1 processor, and it costs 950 pounds. However, the battery has a tiny 3,500mAh capacity, and only Android 12 is installed.

Oppo finding a way to slash this much off the price of the Galaxy Z Flip 4 makes it very tempting, and it deserves your attention. Oppo has also struck a number of important partnerships in the U.K., as the phone is available with the EE and o2 networks, plus through retailers including Carphone Warehouse, Argos, Curry’s, and Amazon. It will be released on March 2.

The Oppo Find N2 Flip is a genuine contender

The Oppo Find N2 Flip isn’t perfect, but it is a genuine alternative to the Galaxy Z Flip 4, and that makes it a very welcome, and very important device. Samsung needs competition, and we need these devices to be worthy, as it encourages development and helps drive prices down. The Find N2 Flip has everything in place to do that.

Compact folding phones are mostly about convenience, so their small dimensions, low weight, and large cover screen work really well. The camera is good, provided you don’t expect Galaxy S23 Ultra levels of ability, and the performance is great for everyday use. This isn’t a powerhouse, but anyone who wants that kind of phone should look at the Galaxy Z Fold 4 instead. I’d have liked the cover screen to be truly useful, but I understand it’s not what this kind of folding smartphone is all about.

If you can buy the Oppo Find N2 Flip, then it’s a steal at the price, and absolutely worth taking a good look at it alongside the Galaxy Z Flip 4.

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