I used the Oppo Find N5, here’s why it’s replacing my Galaxy Z Fold 6

By Nirave Gondhia Published February 20, 2025

After weeks of drip-teasing everyone about its new folding phone, Oppo has finally unveiled the Oppo Find N5. It’s the world’s thinnest foldable, and Oppo has addressed many of the constructive criticisms it faced with the Find N3. The result is a phone that shows that folding phones no longer need to compromise, at least on paper.

The Oppo Find N5 also addresses many of the concerns about the folding phone category as a whole. When using the Galaxy Z Fold 6 or Pixel 9 Pro Fold in public, I’ll often get asked questions like is it durable enough? Can you see the crease? What’s the battery life? What about the cameras?

The Oppo Find N5 addresses most of these, but still leaves some room for improvement in future folding phones. It goes further than any previous folding phone to show that the maturing of technology means folding phones can be as thin and light as a regular phone, with the addition of a secondary display.

Here are our first impressions of Oppo’s new folding phone, which should have launched as the OnePlus Open 2 in the US.

Measuring just 4.21mm thick when unfolded, the Oppo Find N5 is extremely thin. Even more impressive is that it measures 8.93mm thick when folded, making it barely thicker than a regular smartphone despite the large secondary display. It’s so thin that Oppo had to customize the USB-C port; there’s just a hair’s breadth of metal on the outer edge of the port.

Let’s put those numbers into context: it weighs just two grams more than the iPhone 16 Pro Max and is under a millimeter thicker than the Galaxy S25 Ultra (and Apple’s big phone). It is 3mm thinner and 10 grams lighter than the Galaxy Z Fold 6. It’s also thinner and lighter than the Galaxy Z Fold Special Edition, which Samsung launched last year as an upgrade to the Galaxy Z Fold 6. Unfolded, it is almost a millimeter thinner than the Pixel 9 Pro Fold, but also weighs almost 30 grams less.

What about the previous contender for the world’s thinnest folding phone? I love using the Honor Magic V3, but while the Oppo Find N5 is virtually identical in weight, it shaves 0.2mm off the thickness. Honor already broke ground on being thin and light, but the Find N5 takes it a step further.

If you’ve always wanted a folding iPad Mini, look no further: the Find N5 has a bigger display when unfolded, but is thinner and lighter than Apple’s smallest tablet. It’s the closest we’ve come to the final form factor for folding phones, and the company has also reduced the crease significantly. Yes, there’s barely a crease if the light catches it wrong, but it’s still the least-creased folding phone that I’ve used and across ten attempts, I couldn’t get the crease to show up in a photo.

Unfolded, the Find N5 has an 8.12-inch OLED display with Dolby Vision, HDR10+ and HDR Vivid support, a dynamic refresh rate of 1-120Hz, and 2,100 nits peak brightness. Folded, the display measures 6.62 inches with the same display features, higher peak brightness, Dolby Vision, and Ultra HDR Image support.

Here’s how the display sizes compare to the competition:

To put a bow on the display, there’s also stylus support. Unlike the Galaxy Z Fold 6, there’s support for the Pen on both displays, making the Find N5 the first foldable to support a stylus on both displays.

What about the battery life and charging? Surely a folding phone this thin would result in a smaller battery or slower charging? The answer is no: at 5,600 mAh, the Find N5 uses a bigger battery than any mainstream folding phone. For context, the Galaxy Z Fold 6 has a 4,400 mAh battery, the Pixel 9 Pro Fold is slightly bigger at 4,650 mAh, and the OnePlus Open has a 4,805 mAh battery.

This is made possible thanks to the second-generation Silicon Carbon battery, which we also saw deliver outstanding results in the OnePlus 13 and Oppo Find X8 Pro. Oppo and Honor remain the two companies to widely adopt this next-generation battery technology, and thanks to higher density potential, it means that batteries can be thinner than their Lithium-Ion predecessors.

Like other Oppo and OnePlus phones, there’s also superfast charging with the Find N5 coming equipped with 80W wired charging that can charge the battery to full in about 50 minutes. There’s also 50W wireless charging if you buy the additional magnetic charging case, although there’s no official support for Qi2 charging.

You may be wondering where the compromises are, and it would be natural to think that durability could be one of these, but this would be wrong. The Find N5 is the first folding phone to support IPX9 — alongside IPX6 and IPX8 — which means it will withstand high-pressure jets. Or, as we saw with the OnePlus 13, you could probably run it through a dishwasher and it would be fine. However, there’s no rating for dust resistance, so it’s unclear whether it would survive a sandstorm; I guess that it will, but Oppo chose not to pay to certify it for this.

So where are the compromises? There are two that stand out, and they vary in importance. First, the processor: the Find N5 is powered by the flagship Snapdragon 8 Elite, but uses the new 7-core model instead of the 8-core version used by most flagships. This shouldn’t make a huge difference overall in performance, but it will be more efficient and less power-hungry so should lead to improved overall battery life.

The main compromise is likely to be in the camera, which has impressive specs but doesn’t quite hit the heights of recent OnePlus and Oppo phones. It still features a triple-camera setup with a 50MP main camera paired with a 50MP periscope telephoto lens that offers 3x optical zoom, and an 8MP ultrawide camera. The latter is my biggest concern; the Find N5 was bound to feature a compromise somewhere, and the ultrawide camera may prove to be the lesser of the evils, but it’s worth noting that the slightly thicker Magic V3 did manage to include a 40MP ultrawide camera.

I’ve been waiting for the folding phone that felt like it wasn’t a compromise compared to a regular smartphone, and the Oppo Find N5 is the closest we’ve come to this eutopia. On paper, it offers the most rounded experience of any folding phone to date, and my first impressions back up this claim, although it’ll remain to be seen how it performs over the coming days.

I had also hoped that OnePlus would release it as the Open 2, mainly because it would force Samsung and Google — the former particularly — into action and kickstart a golden race toward the perfect folding phone. As it turns out, not releasing it in the US means it may not have the same effect, although these phones will still compete head-to-head in many other markets.

While the Pixel 9 Pro Fold is still fairly competitive, the Galaxy Z Fold 6 would likely lose by every metric, not least its size and weight. My sister was recently considering the Galaxy Z Fold 6 and after using it briefly, she decided against it. She summarized it best: “I played with the Samsung fold and it’s quite heavy, no?”