Oppo Find N5 Review – Setting the bar for flagship foldables

Oppo is coming into its own as a smartphone maker, and its recent array of top-shelf flagships—led by the Oppo Find N5, currently the world’s thinnest book-style foldable—has made quite an impression on both phone pundits and users alike. We had the opportunity to field test their titular flagship foldable and after a couple of weeks, here’s our Oppo Find N5 review where we share if they take the crown for flagship foldables.

Oppo Find N5 Review – Build and Design

Book-style foldables are becoming old hat these days but the sheer svelteness of the Oppo Find N5 elevates the concept to new heights. When held, our Oppo Find N5 review sample was just 8.9mm thin which is slimmer than most candybar phones and just 4.2mm thin when fully unfolded, making it, at this point in time in early 2025, the world’s thinnest book-style foldable phone. Oppo hasn’t skimped on the use of premium materials and it shows. When held, our Oppo Find N5 weighs just 229g, lighter than my usual steel coffee mug.

That’s not all, the phone isn’t a slouch when it comes to durability either with a Nanocrystal Glass front to protect the cover display, an inner foldable display protected by anti-impact film, a slim yet robust 3D-printed titanium alloy flexion hinge and a surprising IPX8/IPX9 water resistance rating. This water resistance rating means that the Find N5 can survive in 1.5 metres of fresh water for up to 30 minutes and also resist high pressure jets of water which is an impressive feat for a foldable. It’s still not dust resistant though so trips to the beach or to dusty areas like the desert or a construction site are off the cards.

Up front, our Oppo Find N5 review sample comes with an impressive 6.62-inch LTPO OLED display that also has a 120Hz refresh rate and 2,450 nits peak brightness with a tiny 8MP selfie camera in a punch hole up top. As a nice touch, they’ve also pre-applied a screen protector to the front as an added bonus.

The bezels are impressively slim all around with curved corners for better ergonomics. The base of the phone when folded down hosts a single USB-C port for charging duties, a SIM card tray along with one of the two speaker grilles with the top portion hosting the other speaker grille that form a  stereo pair. The top section also has an IR blaster to remotely control appliances which is a rarity in phones these days.

The sides of the Oppo Find N5 features the usual volume rocker and power button that doubles as a fingerprint reader as well as the unusual addition of an alert slider with three settings to let the phone ring, stay silent or just vibrate, which is a feature culled from OnePlus phones. 

While the volume rocker and alert slider are easy to feel and access by touch, the power button is extremely shallow and almost flush with the sides, making it hard to activate let alone find it especially when you’re in a hurry. 

The backplate is otherwise a single slab of metal dominated by a rounded rear triple camera housing with the Oppo logogram at the base. Our unit was done up in a shade of dark gray they’ve designated as Cosmic Black though it can also be acquired in Misty White too. The finish for our review sample also resists fingerprints nicely.

Opening our Oppo Find N5 review sample is an exquisite experience in and of itself with the titanium alloy flexion hinge smoothly opening without any audible clicks to smoothly reveal a near-creaseless 8.12-inch LTPO OLED 120Hz display that offers 2,100 nits peak brightness with a tiny 8MP camera for video calls inset in a punch hole in the corner. The hinge itself is also sufficiently robust that the phone can stand up sideways without any wobble so that it can act as a camera stand on its own for the main rear camera or for the front 8MP camera for hands-free video calls.

Compared to its near peer contenders with a similar book-style form factor, the Oppo Find N5 is in a class of its own with impressive build quality, a beautiful heft and an exquisite finish all around that makes it stand out from the crowd. Bar the shallow power button, the whole affair is beautifully appointed and feels wonderfully durable too with nary a nick or scratch even after toting it around for two weeks in a pocket.

Bundled with the Oppo Find N5 is a case that protects the backplate and hinge, the usual warranty literature, an 80W SuperVOOC fast charger and its accompanying charging cable. The fact they’ve provided a charger out of the box and a free casing along with a pre-applied screen protector to the cover display adds substantially to its value though it still doesn’t come cheap at RM7,999.

Oppo Find N5 Review – Specifications and Benchmarks

In terms of hardware, our Oppo Find N5 review sample comes equipped with a slightly different version of the flagship Snapdragon 8 Elite that nixes one performance core to optimise cooling and power efficiency. According to Qualcomm, the removal of one performance core slows down performance by approximately 14% versus the stock octa core variant. It is conjecture on our part but this may likely be necessary due to the slimness of the phone which means that there isn’t much space for a sufficiently large vapour chamber or other cooling hardware necessary for the full-sized octacore version. Connectivity is excellent with 5G connectivity and fast WiFi 7 and Bluetooth 5.2.

The phone also runs Android 15 with their own ColorOS 15.0 with a guaranteed 4 years of OS and 5 years of security updates. Unfortunately, this isn’t the longest policy in the market but it’s still a decent length of time.

The phone also comes with 16GB RAM and 512GB of non-expandable storage. Of note is that ColorOS 15.0 also has the ability to assign virtual RAM off the onboard storage with up to 12GB of RAM Expansion virtual RAM available in 4GB increments. Here’s how it stacks up on paper:

 

Price	RM7,999
Display	6.62-inch LTPO OLED, 1,140 x 2,616 pixels, 120Hz refresh rate, 2,450 nits peak brightness, Dolby Vision, HDR10+ [cover display] / 8.12-inch LTPO foldable OLED, 2,248 x 2,480 pixels, 120Hz refresh rate, 2,100 nits peak brightness, Dolby Vision, HDR10+
Processor	Snapdragon 8 Elite
OS	Android 15 w/ Color OS 15
Memory	16GB LPDDR5X RAM / 512GB UFS 4.0 storage
Cameras	50MP f/1.9 w/ OIS + 50MP f/2.7 periscope telephoto w/ 3x optical zoom and OIS + 8MP f/2.2 ultra wide angle [rear] / 8MP f/2.4 [cover display camera] / 8MP f/2.4 [folding display camera
Battery	5,600mAh w/ 80W SuperVOOC charging, 50W wireless charging, reverse wireless charging
Size/Weight	160.9 x 74.4 x 8.9mm (folded) / 160.8 x 145.6 x 4.2mm (unfolded / 229g)

When subjected to benchmarks, our Oppo Find N5 review sample with the default maximum 12GB RAM scored the following synthetic benchmarks:

3D Mark Steel Nomad Light	2,444
3D Mark Steel Nomad Light Unlimited	2,243
3D Mark Solar Bay	9,593
3D Mark Solar Bay Unlimited	8,715
3D Mark WildLife Extreme	5,757
3D Mark WildLife Extreme Unlimited	5,718
Geekbench 6 Single Core	2,940
Geekbench 6 Multi Core	8,151
Geekbench 6 OpenCL	17,570
Geekbench 6 Vulkan	23,781
Geekbench AI (CPU quanticised)	3,347
Geekbench AI (GPU quanticised)	1,539
PCMark Work 3.0 Performance	14,787
PCMark Battery Life	N/A

When compared to a phone with a stock Snapdragon 8 Elite octacore, our Oppo Find N5 review sample with its 7-core Snapdragon 8 Elite did score slightly behind the standard Snapdragon 8 Elite chipset though not by far. 

The tradeoff in performance for better battery efficiency and cooling was tested with the Steel Nomad Light Stress Test where it got a best loop score of 2,194 and a lowest loop score of 1,254 with 57.2% stability while getting between 39°C to 48°C temperatures. The phone throttles quite modestly, kicking in more aggressively in later loops for a modest drop in performance and surprisingly even managed to get better higher and lower loop scores than a full 8-core Snapdragon 8 Elite chipset though with lower stability on account of having less cooling hardware. 

For regular day to day use and casual gaming, you won’t notice a substantial difference if at all and the vast majority of users will enjoy snappy, smooth and swift performance for most casual games and apps though the most ardent hardcore gamers may find that a phone with a full 8-core Snapdragon 8 Elite chipset may be a more appealing choice. In any case, hardcore gamers aren’t the intended user base for the Oppo Find N5 so it’s not a dealbreaker.

Both the front and main folding display of our Oppo Find N5 review sample were impressive affairs with excellent detail, vibrant colour rendition and good clarity even under direct sunlight thanks to the cover display’s 2,450 nits and inner display’s 2,100 nits peak brightness.

Movies like the Dark Knight with dark backgrounds offered beautifully deep blacks while in the Fifth Element, both displays served up luscious colours like Leeloo’s neon orange hair and colourful costumes. The stereo speakers on the top and bottom of the phone offered a good level of volume along with a fair amount of detail and are sufficient for casual Netflix and Spotify binging duties. 

What elevates the Oppo Find N5 above the competition is its main folding display that’s nigh creaseless and which can only be seen if the screen is off and its front cover display that’s about as large as a conventional candybar phone, effectively offering the best features of both a foldable and candybar phone in one svelte design.

Oppo has quite a few interesting tricks packed into their ColorOS 15. On top of the obligatory and now standard Circle to Search with Google, Oppo has enabled a measure of multitasking with the ability to split the main folding display into three panes and run three apps simultaneously and save your preferred layout for later use. It also has a slide out menu tab from the side with shortcuts including a Screen Translation feature using google Lens that translates everything seen onscreen into your preferred language

Another feature that ColorOS has is the provision of their own inhouse AI Studio app that leverages AI for generating images so you can regimagine a plain old mugshot into something more exciting or add filters. Unfortunately, there’s no Ghibli filter baked in but there’s still plenty of other options to choose from.

You also get an array of AI Image Editor features that are baked into the Oppo Photo gallery app that allow you to move parts of an image around, delete objects, remove reflections and improve sharpness too.

In terms of battery life, our Oppo Find N5 review sample comes with a 5,600mAh battery which is among the largest for a foldable phone with support for fast 80W SuperVOOC fast charging off the proprietary USB cable and charger, 50W wireless charging and reverse wireless charging. 

Unfortunately, PCMark’s battery life benchmark test kept failing but in practical usage conditions, it managed to last a comfortable day and a half of moderate usage with data or WiFi on, a few minutes of phone calls, social media use, emails and a combination of the cover and main display though you can likely eke out longer endurance if you stick to just the cover display. The charger and cable are proprietary in nature and are necessary to get its full 80W charging speed but with everything in place, it’s able to go from dead zero to full charge in just under an hour.

Oppo Find N5 Review – Cameras

Like many book-style foldables, our Oppo Find N5 review sample packs its best cameras emplaced in a rear triple camera array. Most of the grunt work is handled by the 50MP main camera with OIS while a 50MP telephoto camera with a periscope-style lens offers up to 3x telephoto zoom and OIS. Rounding things off is an 8MP ultra wide angle camera. 

Combined, this triple camera setup offers snaps at up to 120x digital zoom while offering up to 4K@60fps video and up to 18x video digital zoom. The front 8MP and main 8MP folding display cameras are more modest affairs with no zoom, up to 4K@30fps video capture while also capturing stills with both cameras having the same performance parameters.

In field tests, the rear 8MP ultra wide camera was capable of decent shots in daylight conditions and works well especially in urban scenarios or large group shots while offering good detail though it its limitations on account of its modest sensor size leading to less detail with most of the grunt work primarily handled by the two other main cameras.

The primary 50MP rear camera on the Oppo Find N5 offered excellent shots in daylight with good detail, great dynamic range and lifelike colour rendition with crisp shots out to 3x zoom with shots out at 6x zoom from the 50MP telephoto camera still offering good levels of detail and good noise control. Beyond that, shots start to look softer and details slowly start getting smooshed together and while it can take shots at 120x zoom, it’s more of a novelty than anything else.

In low light, the rear triple camera array holds up well, capturing good levels of detail, decent dynamic range and some competent noise management for the ultrawide, main and telephoto cameras out to 3x zoom with shots beyond this looking rather soft though it captures it at sufficient quality for social media use. 

The front cover and main inner display cameras are functionally identical and offer good performance with relatively accurate skin tone rendition and detail sufficient for video calls and the odd selfie or two but otherwise pale to the performance of the main rear triple cameras.

In general, the Oppo Find N5’s rear triple camera is among the best for foldables with strong primary camera and telephoto camera performance though the ultra wide angle camera’s performance is somewhat underwhelming compared to the competition.

Should you buy the Oppo Find N5?

The Oppo Find N5 offers superb build quality with a slim yet sturdy titanium alloy  flexion hinge and incredible slimness while retaining excellent LTPO OLED displays, a solid set of cameras and decent battery life. The design is one of the best in the market for flagship foldables at this point in time save for the power button that’s too shallow for easy activation. 

Another quibble is that it also doesn’t have the longest OS and security update policy in the market at just 4 years for OS and 5 years for security updates compared to incumbents that offer 7 years of OS and security updates out of the box. Bar these quibbles, this is one of the best flagship foldables that money can currently buy in early 2025 though it does not come cheap.

Oppo Find N5 review sample courtesy of Oppo Malaysia. For more details please visit https://www.oppo.com/my/store/product/oppo-find-n5.P.P1100032