Oppo Find N3 Flip Review

Oppo is launching the Find N3 Flip, the next tiny foldable smartphone with an improved design, hinge, performance, and camera experience. It’s only an evolutionary update over the Find N2 Flip, but it’s already shaping out to be one of the greatest smartphones in its category.

The Oppo Find N2 Flip does a lot of things well, including a large cover screen and an excellent hinge and display crease (or lack thereof). The Find N3 Flip maintains these fantastic features while also providing excellent camera performance.

Oppo launched the phone globally, although it has not been as popular as the Find N2 Flip. That means you can buy it in Asia and the Middle East, but it is not yet officially available in the United States, the European Union, or the United Kingdom. The phone costs S$1499/INR 94,999 (~$1126/£890) for the 12GB+256GB edition in Cream Gold, Misty Pink, and Sleek Black colors. A 512GB storage variant is also available, although it appears to be exclusive to China.

I had the 16GB/256GB Sleek Black variant for review. The phone competes with the Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 5, and it outperforms it in terms of design, foldability, and, most importantly, photography experience. It isn’t flawless, but it’s a top candidate.

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KEY FEATURES

The Oppo Find N3 Flip is an excellent flip phone with high-quality hardware, an attractive design, and reliable foldable software capabilities. You get decent performance, all-day battery life, and a robust feel, which is unusual for flip phones. It’s a terrific alternative to the Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 5, but its global availability is limited.

Oppo Find N3 Flip UNBOXING

Oppo sends the Find N3 Flip in a huge, thick paper package. Inside, you’ll find the phone, an overqualified 67W SuperVOOC charger, and an 8A USB-A-to-C cable.

Oppo also sent the optional Blicca case with figurine and strap, as well as the PU leather hand strap case. The Blicca case is, well, distinctive, and we can assume it will appeal to a specific demographic.

CAMERA

The Oppo Find N3 Flip focuses on cameras. Flip phones are sleek and portable, but their cameras haven’t been particularly impressive thus far. The N3 Flip addresses this. The triple camera configuration is an upgrade, and it retains the distinctive Oppo quality that I’ve loved as the company’s Hasselblad relationship has evolved in recent years.

The primary camera is good, reproducing colors and sceneries accurately. The 50MP main camera provides a good degree of information. Even when you don’t use the specific portrait mode, the camera excels at shooting rich, color-filled sceneries and portraits.

The Ultrawide camera is also fairly decent. There isn’t much loss of detail, and it works very well. I did find that it has a somewhat colder tone than the primary camera, although this was only evident indoors with hazy lighting. In other cases, I discovered that the Ultrawide could match the color that the primary camera produced.

The telephoto lens is the highlight feature here, and it’s rather stunning for such a small phone. You get 2x optical zoom with digital steps up to 5x, and it generally works nicely. You get plenty of information, and the stabilization is excellent.

In low-light conditions, I found various image processing difficulties at the 5X zoom level, including noticeable overprocessed details. The photographs don’t look bad on the surface, but they might not look great when zoomed in. However, the 2x optical step performs far better. The overall low-light performance is strong, as is the overall telephoto performance.

The selfie camera is above average but could have been improved. It has a haze when there is too much lighting, and a few efforts result in whitewashed selfies, but it otherwise gives precise detail and color. I didn’t think this was a huge concern because the cover display works great for taking shots with the main cameras.

Overall, this is the best camera performance you can get from a flip phone, therefore the Find N3 Flip lives up to its camera promises.

DESIGN AND SCREEN

The Oppo Find N3 Flip is very similar to the N2 Flip, which is not surprising given that it was released only nine months after the N2 Flip. Oppo has still made enough changes to differentiate itself meaningfully.

Let’s start with one of the most significant improvements: IPX4 protection. The Find N3 Flip variant is splashproof, which is a wonderful improvement. While the IPX4 classification does not cover water submersion, it does suggest that the N3 Flip can withstand 360-degree low-pressure water sprays, such as rain or showers, which should be enough for the majority of potential purchasers. The N2 Flip also has enhanced screen protection, with Gorilla Glass Victus replacing Glass 5.

The two rear panels are now made of glass rather than plastic, marking another step toward what is usually regarded as a quality build. Another modification is the smaller metal frame, which allows for more curvier panels and, arguably, a prettier shape. Oh, and OnePlus has introduced a new control on the frame called the Alert Slider, which has three places.

The Oppo Find N3 Flip features two displays: a 6.8-inch foldable LTPO OLED with a thin protective layer on top, and a 3.26-inch AMOLED cover screen with Gorilla Glass Victus protection.

Let us start with the small screen. It’s a 3.26-inch AMOLED with 720 x 382 pixels (250ppi) and a nice 17:9 aspect ratio, which should work well for portrait and video selfies. The screen’s normal brightness is 500nits, with a peak brightness of 900nits. It cannot run all Android apps, but Oppo provides a diverse set of compatible mini-apps, as well as a variety of custom features and widgets for this little device. We’ll look at those on the next page.

The actual star, however, is the 6.8-inch foldable LTPO AMOLED with a resolution of 2,520 x 1,080 pixels (403ppi) and a standard 21:9 aspect ratio. This panel has a dynamic refresh rate of 120Hz, 240Hz touch sampling, and 1440Hz PWM dimming. The screen is HDR10+ certified, with official brightness specifications of 500nits for normal, 1,200nits for maximum auto, and 1,600 nits for peak brightness.

We can confirm that the little display indeed achieves the claimed 500 nits of maximum adjustable brightness and becomes pretty bright in direct sunlight, allowing us to see what’s on it.

We’ve also finalized the display measurements for the main screen. The highest brightness in manual mode was 495 units in Vivid color mode and 520 units in Natural color mode. The maximum auto brightness changes according to the color setting, with 939nits for Vivid and 989nits for Natural. That is not precisely 1,200 nits, but it is not too far off.

HOW’S THE PERFORMANCE?

The Oppo Find N3 Flip uses the top-of-the-line Dimensity 9200 processor. It is manufactured on the 2nd Generation TSMC 4nm process (N4P) and offers numerous advantages over the Dimensity 9000 inside the N2 Flip.

The Dimensity 9200 chipset includes an octa-core CPU with newer core models: a prime Cortex-X3 core at 3.05GHz, three Cortex-A715 cores at 2.85GHz, and four Cortex-A510 cores at 1.8GHz.

The SoC is powered by the ARM Immortalis-G715 MC11 GPU, which includes a hardware-based ray tracing engine. The new flagship graphics unit includes Variable Rate Shading (VRS), which doubles machine learning performance over its predecessor, and ARM Fixed Rate Compression (AFRC), which reduces bandwidth utilization.

MediaTek is also introducing a sixth-generation AI Processing Unit, the APU 690, which outperforms its predecessor by 35% in the ETHZ5.0 benchmark. The chipset also supports fast LPDDR5X RAM with speeds of up to 8,533Mbps, as well as UFS 4.0 storage for lightning-quick data transmission and direct storage access to processor cores.

The Oppo Find N3 Flip in this review has 12GB of LPDDR5X RAM and 256GB of UFS 4.0 storage. A 512GB variant is also in circulation.

FINAL THOUGHTS

The Oppo Find N3 Flip is a great flip phone. It nails the fundamentals and checks all the necessary boxes. You get flagship-tier technology, and the foldable display is a pleasure to use because to its low wrinkle and better feel.

It also performs well in everyday situations; nevertheless, if you’re a mobile gamer, this isn’t the phone for you. On the other hand, the battery life is impressive, particularly for a phone of this size. The 44W SuperVOOC charger included in the box makes this one of the fastest-charging flip phones available. With an all-day battery life, the Find N3 Flip is really useful.

Buy it if...

• Exquisite glass design with IPX4 splash proofing.
• Excellent foldable OLED with HDR10 capability, brightness, and color accuracy.
• A useful OLED cover with many mini-apps and entertaining pets.
• Dependable battery life and one of the fastest charging times in the Flip category.
• Loud stereo speakers with good audio quality.
• Flagship-level performance.
• High-quality images and movies from all back cameras, day and night.
• The 5x zoom proved to be quite good.
• ColorOS is powerful, and there have been 5 years of improvements.

Don't buy it if...

• No HFR gaming.
• Throttles are turned up high.
• The tele camera should fire more frequently at night.
• The internal (selfie) camera is average.
• Using the cover screen as a viewfinder restricts video recording to 1080p.

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