OPPO Find N5 sets a new standard for foldable engineering

Foldable smartphones penetrated the mainstream years ago, but there’s still plenty of room for manufacturers to innovate. The allure of having a tablet-sized screen ready to unfold from your pocket at a moment’s notice is easy to understand, and generation by generation, phone makers work to make realizing that dream as practical for shoppers as possible.

One boundary we keep seeing pushed is foldable thickness, as companies strive to build foldable models that don’t feel noticeably different from traditional handsets. This week OPPO sets a new bar that everyone else will be comparing their foldables against as it officially introduces the incredibly thin Find N5.

Measuring just 8.5mm thick when folded shut and a crazy 4.21mm thick when open, the OPPO Find N5 isn’t just thinner but also weighs in lighter than its competition, hitting the scales at a mere 229g. Compared to a foldable like the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 6, the Find N5 is 26% slimmer and 10g lighter. But the physical dimensions are just one small facet of the full picture here. Check out everything else OPPO has to offer with the Find N5:

It used to be the case that living on the bleeding edge with a folding-screen smartphone meant making compromises at every turn. Beyond just the sheer bulk of those initial designs, early adopters had to contend with perilously fragile hardware that could seem like it was trying to find any opportunity to break.

With the Find N5, however, OPPO presents us with hardware that is doing just about everything it can to flip that script, from the robust titanium flexion hinge that’s been tested for tens of thousands of fold-unfold cycles in even extreme climate conditions, to the company’s least prominent crease on a folding screen to date.

Similarly, while regular smartphones figured out waterproofing ages ago, ingress protection in general has been a much tougher nut to crack with foldable designs. That’s not stopping OPPO even a little bit, and the company says that the N5 is the first foldable to achieve certification for IPX6, IPX8, and IPX9 water resistance tests.

One recurring problem with foldables is where to fit the battery, and with a model emphasizing thinness to the extent the Find N5 does, that’s only going to be doubly true. OPPO rises to that challenge with some silicon-carbon battery tech, letting it squeeze a 5,600mAh component into a smaller space than its predecessor’s 4,800mAh battery took up.

As you should only expect from a 2025 flagship, this handset is packed to the brim with the latest silicon — even all this foldable business notwithstanding, OPPO’s put together a beast of an Android phone. That spells not just the presence of a Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite processor, but a full 16GB of LPDDR5X RAM — no 12GB half-measures here. We see the same sort of approach when it comes to the foldable’s storage, and OPPO’s not going to waste your time with paltry capacities: Everybody gets 512GB.

Camera enthusiasts should find lots to like from the Find N5’s imaging package, and the “Cosmos Ring” enclosing the camera array is now 20% smaller than on the Find N3. That houses the 50MP main camera, 8MP ultrawide, and the 50MP telephoto camera with its periscope lens for capturing distant details. As you should only expect in this day and age, that hardware is helped out every step along the way by the latest AI tricks, from extending zoom performance to 60x to helping unblur those shots you couldn’t quite nail the exposure on.

OPPO Find N5 price and availability

Intrigued by what OPPO’s putting down here? We can’t blame you, so how can you go about taking this high-end folder home with you? Well, that’s a little tricky.

So far, OPPO has not shared much in the way of specifics about its release plans for the Find N5. Although the N5 is launching internationally, OPPO has yet to divulge specific markets and the pricing at which the phone will land. This is not going to be a budget foldable, certainly, and while pricing should definitely be in the premium space, OPPO has told us that it intends to position the Find N5 competitively among its peers.

Maybe the toughest pill to swallow, though, is that the US isn’t getting this phone — not from OPPO, certainly, but not even from OnePlus. While the Find N3 came to the States as the OnePlus Open, the company has recently confirmed that it has no plans to launch a OnePlus Open 2 this year. Although that doesn’t discount the possibility of it arriving some day, in some other form, we’re not holding our breath. For the moment, that means that foldable fans pretty much everywhere are stuck waiting for OPPO to share the rest of its release plans.