Oppo’s Find N3 Flip fashion phone is ready for its close-up

  • The Oppo Find N3 Flip, with its bigger camera bump and rounded-over corners.

  • The inside. I spy a three-position mute switch at the top.

  • Another look at the inside screen. These flip phones feel just like normal phones once you open them up.

  • The front screen looks like a mini phone, so you get cute mini-phone interfaces like this.

  • A selection of front screen apps. These are all built-in Oppo apps as far as we can tell.

  • 44 W charging is nice. You can also get a look at the shiny sides here.

  • It comes in three colors, gold, pink, and black.

  • The gold version has this lovely pearlescent effect.

Oppo’s newest flip phone is the Oppo Find N3 Flip, a 6,799 yuan (~$932) foldable debuting in China but heading to the rest of the world soon. The Find N3 Flip will be taking on the likes of the Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 5 and Motorola Razr, and while both of those phones have tried to power up with a big front screen, the N3 Flip’s front display is basically the same size as last year. Oppo is making up for that with a pretty big spec sheet, though.

This is a normal-size phone, with a 6.8-inch, 2520×1080, 120 Hz inner OLED display, and the whole thing folds in half, becoming a smaller, 16.45-mm-thick square. When closed up, you can casually poke around on the tiny 3.26-inch front screen. The fun bit of this design is that the front 720×382, 60 Hz OLED looks just like a mini phone, and you’ll have a few proprietary mini apps to play with, like a media player, a notification view, a weather app, a fitness app, plus a few more. The front screen is not as big as Oppo’s competitors because you’ll be getting a big, round camera bump, featuring three sensors, a 50 MP main camera, 48 MP ultra-wide, and a 32 MP 2x telephoto camera.

The SoC is a Mediatek Dimensity 9200, which means it features a 4 nm SoC with one 3.05 GHz Arm Cortex X3 core, three 2.85 GHz Cortex A715 cores, and four Cortex A510 cores, plus an Arm Mali-G715 Immortalis MP11 GPU. It also comes with 12GB of RAM, 256GB or 512GB of UFS 4.0 storage, a side-fingerprint reader, Wi-Fi 7 support, and NFC.

Of course, the big downside of these foldables is the battery, and you’ll be getting a 4,300 mAh battery with 44 W charging. A non-foldable phone of this size would feature a 5000 mAh battery, but compared to other flip phones—the 3700 mAh Galaxy Z Flip 5 and 3800 mAh Razr—this is pretty good. All of these specs are pretty good, actually. Sometimes flip phones get saddled with mediocre components, but this looks like flagship-level stuff.

  • Oppo teamed up with a bunch of fashion companies to make these designer handbag cases.

  • Some of these even have a shoulder strap, like a real purse.

  • Another shoulder strap. It’s like a purse except it only holds a phone. I’m no expert, but surely you would want to hold more than only a phone at the end of a shoulder strap?

  • Oppo’s website is full of glamorous fashion shots like this.

  • I’m not even sure what’s going on with this one. It has a (presumably faux) diamond shoulder strap, then a huge block of diamond-cut plastic on the bottom? There isn’t a lot of info about these cases.

Oppo’s marketing department is leaning into the “flip phones as fashion accessory” theory with the N3 Flip. Almost every picture on the marketing site features a glamorous person using the phone on a yacht or at a wedding or in an art gallery. Oppo teamed up with several fashion companies to make a lineup of cases that all look like designer handbags, and some even feature a shoulder strap.

The “fashion” angle is here because there isn’t a serious usability benefit for these new-age flip phones if you’re just trying to get stuff done. Once it’s open, it’s the same as a regular phone, but you’ve spent a premium on the foldable screen and will have to deal with questionable durability and miss out on a lot of battery life thanks to the hinge. You had better think this phone looks good because that’s all flip phones have to offer. If you like the look of it, great! But otherwise, a normal phone is way more practical.

The design is a bit different for the N3 Flip this year, with the top half featuring a rounded-over glass back, as opposed to the flat design of last year. The sides have been polished to a mirror shine, and the camera bump has some lovely knurling around it. Oppo also borrowed the three-position silence switch from its subsidiary, OnePlus. It comes in pink, a rather interesting pearlescent gold, and black.

If you’re ready for your walk down the runway, preorders in China are live now, and the phone will ship in September. The N2 Flip had a wide distribution, so the rest of the world will get this eventually.

Listing image by Oppo

https://arstechnica.com/?p=1963982