The New King of Clamshells – Trusted Reviews

Oppo’s Find N2 Flip manages to beat the popular Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 4 in most areas including design, display, camera and battery life while costing less than Samsung’s option. This could be the clamshell foldable phone to buy in 2023. 

Pre-order the Oppo Find N2 Flip from O2

Introduction

The Oppo Find N2 Flip is the first clamshell foldable to offer an uncompromised smartphone experience, boasting all-day battery life, a great display, top-end performance and decent cameras. 

In fact, it has done all this while still managing to be a whopping £150 cheaper than the £999 Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 4, coming in at just £849 – the same price as the Samsung Galaxy S23. 

Could the Oppo Find N2 Flip be the phone to knock Samsung’s Galaxy Z Flip 4 off its perch as the most popular clamshell around?

After testing the Find N2 Flip for over a week, I certainly think so. 

Design and screen

• Gapless fold
• Barely noticeable crease on foldable display
• Top-end 6.8in 120Hz AMOLED display

The Oppo Find N2 Flip is a high-end clamshell foldable that looks and feels high-end, from the fairly thin dimensions to small touches like the inclusion of a wave-like texture on the spine of the hinge when the light hits it. It looks and feels the part, and unlike the popular Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 4, it’ll close completely flat with no discernable gap.

The finish will actually depend on the colour option you go for. The Moonlit Purple finish I was sent has a largely glossy finish both on the shiny aluminium frame and the rear. While that usually creates a problem with fingerprints, Oppo’s anti-fingerprint coating actually does an impressive job at keeping smudges and smears to a minimum, even on the frame. 

If the Moonlit Purple is a bit too in your face, the Astral Black variant is more understated in its design and uses a largely matte finish for a more elegant look.  

One of the big differences between the Oppo Find N2 Flip and its clamshell competition is the size of the cover display, with a 3.26-inch bezeless OLED panel dwarfing both the 1.9-inch cover display of the Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 4 and the 2.7-inch display of the Motorola Razr.

It doesn’t, however, provide complete access to the Android OS like the Razr, nor does it only concentrate on notifications like the Z Flip 4. It instead offers a comfortable middle ground with access to notifications, connectivity controls and a handful of widgets for the camera, weather, calendar, timers and more specifically designed for the exterior display.

It works very well with a largely polished finish that allows you to reply to incoming texts and WhatsApp messages using preset replies and emoji, though I’d like to see a bit more done with the external display in future, whether that’s app-specific widgets for apps like Google Maps or Spotify, or even simpler additions like the ability to access Google Assistant from the cover display.  

Cover display aside, the foldable nature of the clamshell really does make it a versatile bit of kit. You can do things like take selfies using the large cover display without a cropped preview of the photo you’ll be taking, you can prop it up mid-fold for video calls and even hold it in an old-school camcorder orientation that gives better stability when taking photos and recording videos. 

It’s a lot of fun to use, the functionality is genuinely useful and it’s something that I guarantee your mates will be as impressed with, as mine have been. It also had the knock-on effect of stopping me from using my phone quite as much as the extra barrier of having to open the phone made me question whether I needed to use it or if I was simply using it out of habit. 

However, it’s the internal display really is where the Oppo Find N2 Flip stands head and shoulders above the rest of the clamshell foldable competition.

That’s mainly due to the infamous crease that has plagued even the best foldable phones since their inception. We’ve seen decent improvements from the likes of Samsung over the years, but Oppo’s year-on-year improvement is impressive. It uses a new-gen Flexion hinge with a waterdrop design compared to the U-shaped hinge by Samsung and co with a 60% reduction in the crease compared to the China-only Oppo Find N from 2022. 

That essentially means that the crease is barely visible when looking at it straight on. Sure, there’s still a slight curvature when looking side-on but that’s not a dealbreaker for the person using the phone (only the nosey people around!). The dent in the display is also nearly non-existent. I can still feel it when I run my finger over it, but it’s merely a slight change in sensation rather than a notable dip. 

Simply put, Oppo has come closer than anyone else to creating the fabled crease-less foldable display. 

Crease (or lack of) aside, the OLED display is the biggest Oppo currently makes at 6.8 inches with a 21:9 aspect ratio that makes it both easy to hold one-handed and perfect for watching Hollywood blockbusters without those annoying black bars – and that’s further enhanced by support for both Dolby Vision and HDR10+ content. 

There’s also support for LTPO technology from 120Hz down to 1Hz in a bid to not only make everything feel more responsive in use but to improve battery life, allowing the phone to automatically drop the refresh rate when there isn’t much motion on screen. 

The display is plenty bright at a maximum of 1600 nits (when watching HDR content) though the plastic-y finish of the foldable display means that it’s a fingerprint magnet and this is really highlighted when using the phone in bright daylight. It’s easy to wipe, but it’s still an inconvenience. 

Cameras

• Decent 50MP + 12MP rear camera setup
• Great in bright environments, not so much in the dark
• 32MP selfie camera used mainly for video calling

Cameras on foldables have traditionally lagged behind the capabilities of their standard smartphone counterparts. That’s still very much the case with the Oppo Find N2 Flip and its rear combination of a 50MP main and 8MP ultra-wide, but there are big gains compared to other foldables like the dual 12MP offering of the Z Flip 4 that allow it to better compete with standard smartphones.

In well-lit conditions the photos captured on the Find N2 Flip are vibrant, detailed with plenty of light and very little in the way of aggressive noise reduction tech, even when cropping into an image. That’s down in part to the pixel binning tech and OIS applied to the main 50MP sensor, though performance isn’t that different from the ultra-wide lens. 

That performance isn’t quite as consistent when it comes to low-light photography, however. The 50MP main lens can hold its own if there is light in the scene from street lamps or buildings, with fairly crisp images even when shot handheld, but it can’t quite manage when light levels really begin to drop. 

As you can see from the below image, the results can often be much softer and it’s easier to spot aggressive noise reduction tech that gives areas of images an almost oil painting-like aesthetic.

That’s much the same with the 8MP ultrawide, though with an f/2.2 aperture and a lack of OIS and pixel-binning tech, that’s not too surprising.

There is also an option to use a 2X zoom in the Camera app, but it’s worth noting that this is simply a crop of the main lens and I noticed artefacting and noise in some shots like the below sunset. Look to the top left and you’ll see what I mean…  

With the ability to use the rear cameras as selfie cameras in a folded position, there isn’t as much of a focus on selfie cameras here. You’ll find a fairly decent 32MP holepunch camera centrally embedded within the interior foldable display, though this will mainly be used for video calling. For high-quality snaps and video, the rear cameras really are the ones to use. 

Performance

• MediaTek Dimensity 9000+
• Performance mirrors that of other foldable
• ColorOS 13 offers a premium software experience

While Oppo coins the Find N2 Flip as the foldable flagship without compromise, that doesn’t quite extend to the chipset within.

First off, Oppo has followed the route of the Reno series and decided to use a MediaTek chipset in place of the more popular Snapdragon 8 Plus Gen 1 or 8 Gen 2 chipset. More specifically, the Find N2 Flip sports the premium Dimensity 9000+, and while that’s still perfectly capable – as backed up by benchmark results – it’s not the top-end Dimensity chipset. That’d be the Dimensity 9200.

With that being said, the Find N2 Flip can compete with the Snapdragon 8 Plus Gen 1 used in the likes of the Motorola Razr and Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 4 – though it’s a way behind the power of the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 used in non-foldable 2023 flagships. 

For context, the Find N2 Flip scored 3404 in Geekbench 5, which is in line with the Z Flip 4’s 3656 but way off the OnePlus 11’s 4856. Graphics benchmarks paint a similar picture – one that allows the Find N2 Flip to compete with other foldables, but not standard flagships. 

Of course, that’s just synthetic benchmarks. In real-world use, the Find N2 Flip feels as rapid and responsive as you’d expect from a flagship smartphone. Apps open instantly, there’s no stutter or lag when scrolling and it can run just about any Android game without worry. It’s just not the fastest phone you can buy in 2023.  

Audio is fairly decent with stereo speakers that help provide a more immersive soundscape when watching videos out loud, though I’d recommend opting for wireless headphones as you’ll get to use the phone’s built-in Dolby Atmos tuning to enhance the sound of the film or song you’re listening to. 

You can also expect top-level connectivity with support for 5G with dual-SIM capabilities, Wi-Fi 6, Bluetooth 5.3 and NFC – but it’s no standard NFC. Oppo claims that the 360-degree NFC can be used both folded and unfolded, and while that is true, I will say that I had more issues with card readers using the Find N2 Flip than nearly any other Android phone I’ve used of late. 

The Oppo Find N2 Flip comes with Android 13 out of the box with Oppo’s ColorOS 13 skin applied. It’s not quite the stock Android you’ll get from the Razr or non-foldable phones like the Google Pixel 7, but I think that ColorOS is one of the better Android skins on the market with a high level of polish, a simple-to-use interface and genuinely helpful features that enhance the overall experience on offer.

That ranges from big features like Shelf, a place to access Oppo-designed widgets without adding them to your home screen, to smaller features like dynamic ringtones that’ll change the pitch of the alert tone if you get multiple notifications in quick succession.

The latter may seem pointless, but it stops the phone from repeating the same annoying chime over and over again. It’s a small touch, but one that showcases just how much attention to detail there is within ColorOS. 

It’s not quite perfect just yet, with small software issues like the layout of the connectivity controls in the notification shade constantly resetting and the exterior display sometimes displaying upside down, but I’m confident that these will be ironed out quickly after release. 

Oppo has also committed to four years of OS upgrades and five years of security updates for the Find N2 Flip which should take it through to Android 17. Compared to the Razr which only gets the upgrade to Android 13, it’s real value for money for long-term users. 

Battery life

• Larger battery than key foldable rivals
• All-day battery life
• Fast 45W charging

Battery life is an area where the Oppo Find N2 Flip arguably excels more than any of its clamshell foldable counterparts with the largest battery around at 4300mAh. For context, the Samsung Z Flip 4 boasts a 3700mAh battery while the Motorola Razr comes in at 3500mAh.

As you might expect, that translates to true all-day battery life split across the cover and main displays. I usually take it off charge at around 8am and I’ll use it throughout the day to send WhatsApp messages, take the occasional photo, stream videos on TikTok and listen to music on YouTube Music, before getting to bed at around midnight with 20-30% charge left most evenings.

It’s not quite a two-day device though; without an overnight charge, I found that the phone would run out of charge fairly early the next day.

Of course, battery performance will vary depending on what you’re doing, with streaming Netflix using just 8% in an hour while light gaming will drain a little more at 7% in just half an hour, and heavy gaming will push that to 13% in 30 minutes, but for most people, it should be an all-day device.

It’ll also charge much quicker than any other foldable around right now, using Oppo’s SuperVOOC 45W charging to provide 50% charge in 24 minutes and a full charge in an hour, trumping the 25W and 30W charging from Samsung and Motorola respectively.