Oppo Find N5 review: the final evolution of foldables

Oppo’s Find N5 feels like the end game for foldable phones. Not because it’s make or break for a segment of the phone market that never quite took off like manufacturers hoped it would, but because I simply don’t know where we go from here. There’s scarcely room to make the phone thinner without ditching USB-C entirely; battery life, performance, and even cameras are now on par with other flagship phones; and this time, Oppo even managed to fit wireless charging and water resistance in, too. This is what we were promised all along. Now what?

It’s hard to see how the hardware improves much further. At 8.93mm thick when closed, this is the thinnest foldable in the world, shaving almost half a millimeter off the previous record holder, Honor’s Magic V3. It’s just 4.21mm thin when it’s open, which proves there’s still space to trim — Huawei’s trifold Mate XT runs to just 3.6mm — but we’re close to at least one hard physical limit. Oppo told me it had to customize the USB-C port to fit it into a phone this thin. There’s only a hair’s breadth of metal on the port’s outer edge. If foldable phones are going to get meaningfully thinner, USB-C has to go first.

Every comparison you can make to other devices sounds impressive. When closed, this is less than a millimeter thicker than an iPhone 16 Pro Max or Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra and weighs only 2g more than the Apple phone. Open, it boasts a bigger screen than an iPad Mini but is thinner and weighs less. It’s lighter than any of the foldables you can buy in the US right now and is a full 3mm thinner than the Galaxy Z Fold 6. It’s hard to overstate how astonishing the Find N5 feels and how few compromises there are to its design and build. I keep picking it up and marveling at the engineering.

That applies to the 8.12-inch main display, too, where Oppo has worked to reduce the crease where the screen bends. It’s still visible, but only when it catches the light just right, making it easier to ignore than to notice.

Foldables have historically been short on battery life. Surely this is where Oppo cut corners to keep the Find N5 trim, right? Not really. By using a second-generation version of its silicon-carbon battery technology, the company fit in a 5,600mAh capacity — larger than any foldable you’ll find in the US. I spent yesterday visiting friends in an area with unreliable signal, taking plenty of photos along a countryside walk and using the large internal screen to plan an upcoming vacation together. The Find N5 was only down to 50 percent when I went to bed.

The lack of wireless charging was one of the major complaints about the previous Find N3, which eventually launched in the US as the OnePlus Open. That’s been fixed, too, with support for 50W wireless charging if you use one of Oppo’s own AirVooc chargers and slower speeds on regular charging pads. Oppo is selling a magnetic charging case separately, too, but that’s on its own standard — the Find N5 isn’t Qi2 Ready-certified.

Battery life is probably helped by adopting a new seven-core version of Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Elite chipset, which sacrifices a little performance for better cooling and lower power consumption. It seems like a smart swap: I haven’t noticed the Find N5 stutter once in over a week.

The 8-megapixel ultrawide lens feels like a real afterthought, but the 50-megapixel main and 3x telephoto cameras would hold their own against most flagships. Dim lighting pulls the two apart a little, with the telephoto dropping detail and overcompensating on brightness, losing the warm, natural color balance the Hasselblad-tuned cameras tend to offer the rest of the time. These aren’t the best cameras you’ll find, but they’re at least comparable with the Pixel 9 Pro Fold’s, and I reckon the telephoto here has the edge over Google’s.

If there’s one hardware area with room for improvement, it’s durability. Oppo boasts that this is the first foldable phone with an IPX9 water-resistance rating, but the “X” means there’s no rating for protection from dust — arguably much more important for a foldable phone. While the Find N5 feels remarkably sturdy for its size, foldables are inherently fragile.

Oppo rightly received praise for its novel take on split screening when it launched the Find N3 a year and a half ago. Up to three apps can be opened on the main screen at once, either sharing the space equally or with one dropping off the edge, ready to be pulled back into focus with a tap. It remains the best approach to splitting up a large touchscreen, and Oppo avoided tinkering with it too much here. The only real change is that it’s quicker and easier to enable, accessible via a three-dot menu in the notification bar.

The bigger new feature tries to fit even more apps onto the screen: Mac apps, to be specific. Oppo has expanded its existing O Plus Connect functionality, which previously supported file sharing between Oppo phones and iPhones or iPads, to support Macs. It does more than share files, though: once set up, you can use it to remotely control your Mac. You can turn the phone into a teeny-tiny laptop, with the Mac display mirrored to the top half and either a keyboard or imitation trackpad on the bottom. The phone and Mac don’t need to be on the same network, though the Mac has to be online and awake to initiate the connection. This is the kind of functionality you’d only ever use in a pinch, but it runs surprisingly smoothly, though you have to squint at the screen.

The other software changes are predictably AI-centric. Artificial intelligence can improve your connectivity, translate your calls, and summarize your documents. Google Gemini is now the default assistant, and almost everything the camera does is in some way AI-enabled. None of it is especially exciting, and it feels like it’s only there because it has to be. Four years of Android version updates and six years of security support at least guarantee that there’s a lot more AI to come.

The biggest failure of the Find N5 might just be that it isn’t launching in the US. While we’d expected OnePlus to rebadge the phone as the Open 2, the company has confirmed it won’t release a foldable this year. The UK and Europe will get the Find N5, but the States will not, reducing the pressure on Samsung and Google to put out hardware to match — or to drop their prices, which is really the final frontier of foldables. The Oppo Find N5 has taken book-style foldable hardware about as far as it can go, but at $2,499 SGD (around $1,867), this is still priced for enthusiasts only. If foldables are going to stick around, they need to stop getting thinner and start getting cheaper.

Photography by Dominic Preston / The Verge