In the world of foldables, there are two main types in the market today – a flip-type of foldable, and another is the book-style foldable. OPPO skipped a generation last year and they went from the OPPO Find N3 in 2023, to the OPPO Find N5 in the year 2025. OPPO also dropped the flip phone entirely – at least for this generation.
That leaves us with this OPPO Find N5. It is claimed to be the world’s thinnest book-style foldable phone, and I’ve been using it for the past week, and done a lot of tests on this device too.
Design
Right, let’s talk about the most prominent part of this phone first. The OPPO Find N5 is currently the world’s thinnest book-style foldable – if we discount the camera bump, that is. Well, the camera bump is also thinner than before but we’ll return to this later. It’s important, I promise.
Now, the phone in itself is actually very sleek. Because it’s so thin, the phone truly feels magnificent to hold and also to put in my pocket. Some thicker foldable will hinder the ability to go up the stairs. When folded, the phone measures at only 8.93mm.
When unfolded, it’s at 4.21mm. If I show you the phone at this angle, it really looks impossibly thin – if we ignore the camera bump. OPPO also redesigned the hinge to make it work better with such a thin device, and we can see that the hinge cover is also impossibly thin.
Now, my biggest worry was how it feels to unfold the device. I’ve tried thin foldable before and it was super difficult to unfold. I believe OPPO encountered this issue before as the flat frame does offer some grip to open, else it’s still the best to slot in our fingernail.
I end up opening by using the volume rocker as leverage instead. It’s not a healthy way to unfold the device, but that’s how I did it most of the time.
Also, why the heck did OPPO put the volume rocker and power button so high up? It’s very awkward – and it kinda reminds me of the Galaxy S10+ with the horrendously high power button placement.
Screen
Okay, let’s talk about the screen now. I did way too much testing – one for the outer display, two for the unfolded display, one for each side – and repeat all these tests for the 3 different color modes that it has. With so much data available, I need to create graphs.
Let’s talk about the outer display first. It has a 6.62-inch OLED display with 2616×1140 pixels in resolution, and goes up to 120Hz refresh rate. The maximum brightness of this screen is only at around 1180 nits – which is considered okay.
For the color accuracy, it’s actually the same as what we’ve found on other ColorOS or OxygenOS phones. Both the default natural and Pro color modes yield very similar results, but have much better color vividness when we use the vivid color mode. The ΔE numbers are amazing across the board – so no complaints here.
As for the inner display, this is where things get complicated. We have an 8.12-inch OLED screen with a nearly square resolution of 2480×2248 pixels, and 120Hz refresh rate. This screen’s maximum brightness is quite atrocious as it is only at a maximum of 686 nits for both the left and right sides – and this is just not good. If we’re using the OPPO Find N5 unfolded at some brighter place, we’ll struggle to see what’s on the screen.
OPPO did tell us that they have a new anti-reflection layer on the unfolded display. While that does help a lot in terms of cutting down glare, white lights will now become purple…
Anyway, the color accuracy between the two sides is very similar to each other, and the left side yields a slightly better result. The same story applies – both the default and Pro color modes are nearly identical, and the Vivid color profile makes it a lot more vivid.
The crease is minimal and also thinner compared to the Find N3 Fold. The hinge is a bit unforgiving if we want to use it in Flex Mode though.
Honestly speaking, this phone is just way too wide in both folded and unfolded modes. I like the thin and long form factor of the Galaxy Z Fold more than this. This my personal preference.
Performance
With such a screen, the one thing that I immediately did is to play games on it. And this is where things get interesting. This OPPO Find N5 is the first ever smartphone that we know that is using a 7-core version of the Snapdragon 8 Elite. Basically, it has 2x prime cores and 5x performance cores. That means one of the performance cores is disabled compared to other octa-core Snapdragon 8 Elite phones. I don’t know if we should blame OPPO for only specifying that this is the hepta-core version of the 8 Elite in the specs sheet, or blame Qualcomm for releasing a nerfed version of the 8 Elite with the exact same name and the system settings doesn’t actually show us this distinction.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, this isn’t an issue as the CPU is never the bottleneck for this generation. It’s mostly the GPU, but in this case – it’s the thermals. Whether we play games while folded or unfolded, it will thermal throttle. We cannot cheat physics.
And with a phone so thin, some sacrifices had to be made. Having one less core will help a bit and the OPPO Find N5 seems to have two stages of thermal throttling too – as the first stage yields around 45fps in Genshin Impact, then after some time when it heats up more, it drops to around 40fps.
Zenless Zone Zero remains as the most demanding game in both folded and unfolded modes, as the frame rate can drop to 12fps and 16fps respectively. That’s a big yikes as action-intensive games are going to suffer with such low frame rates.
Battery life
Time for the battery life now. With an equivalent of 5,600mAh battery, the OPPO Find N5 should have great battery life, right? Well, I did two tests for this phone – one folded and another unfolded.
While folded, the Find N5 can last for 18 hours and 25 minutes – and that’s an amazing result.
When the device is unfolded though, it lasts for nearly 14 hours. Again, pretty good.
One explanation for this superb battery life is of course, the reduction of the one performance core – and also how the phone is starving the chip with power. Seriously, even while gaming, this hepta-core version of the Snapdragon 8 Elite in the OPPO Find N5 will only consume an average of around 3.5W. That’s really low, which is why the performance is also low.
Charging speed
The charging speed though, is another story of its own. The Find N5 has an 80W SuperVOOC charger included – but that depends on what region you’re from. As far as I know, the EU region will not have a charger included.
Anyway, with the default out-of-the-box settings, the Find N5 can charge from 15% to completion in around an hour. This red line is for the temperature, which corresponds to the right y-axis – and we can see that the phone is having a hard time cooling off when it hits the charging thermal limit of 40°C. The graph usually will look like a sawtooth graph instead of this.
If we enable the Smart Rapid Charging in the settings menu, then the phone will indeed charge faster by about 12 minutes. However, I don’t recommend you to do so as it raises the charging thermal limit and tries to pump as much power as possible, whenever possible. It’s not healthy for the battery in the long run.
And I was disappointed when I plugged the Find N5 into my USB-PD PPS charger. It does not seem to support USB-PD PPS as it only takes in 13W maximum, and taking nearly 1.5 hours to charge from 15% to completion. The reason why I’m disappointed is because the OPPO Find X8 Pro supports USB-PD PPS of up to 45W. I’m not sure why the Find N5 got downgraded in this aspect and it sucks since we need to carry the proprietary charger and cable if we want fast-charging. This is especially annoying when we’re traveling.
Software
As for the software – the OPPO Find N5 is very similar to the Find N3 Fold. We have things like Aqua Dynamics now alongside the fancy AI features like the AI Speak and AI Summary, but other things kinda just remain the same.
Boundless View is still here, which I think is an amazing way to multitask on a foldable device. OPPO also made the perfect phone companion for macOS and we’ll test it a bit later.
Other than that though, I do think the software side is unchanged. We do have the alert slider – which is a feature that I really like.
Camera
Okay, let’s now talk about the cameras. The camera bump is indeed thinner than the previous generation, and sacrifices had to be made to make it thinner. All camera sensors are smaller compared to the last generation, and the ultrawide angle camera got the biggest downgrade. Even the telephoto lens is now a periscope lens just to make the camera bump thinner.
To have a look at all the pictures and videos taken with the OPPO Find N5, watch our video at the top of this review.
A few more things to mention
Alright, a few more things to mention – the OPPO Find N5 comes with a USB 3 port at the bottom and it’s so thin that the phone is barely thicker than the port itself. It also has display output via USB-C, but it only mirrors the display since it doesn’t have any desktop mode or something like that.
It also has an interesting dual SIM card slot tray to accommodate this thin phone, and it still has an IR blaster at the top too.
The OPPO Find N5 is also rated for IPX8 and IPX9, but please do not shoot water jets on it willy-nilly since any water damage will be at our own cost to fix.
Also, OPPO included a very good case for the Find N5 in the box as well. It’s a hard plastic case with a PU leather material at the back, and it also has a hinge protector too. It doesn’t affect the way the hinge works, and it is just a very nicely designed case.
Should you buy the OPPO Find N5?
Okay, so should you buy the OPPO Find N5? Well, it’s thin and has great battery life. The cameras are great if you don’t use the ultrawide angle, and the software remains familiar to those who are familiar with the Find N3 Fold. If you like the phone – then go for it. No one can stop you. If you want my opinion on it, then I’m going to lay a hot take here.
While the OPPO Find N5 is indeed thin, I think that its thinness comes with many sacrifices. Remember – we cannot cheat physics. With a phone this thin, we can only fit so many components in it. It’s clear that the gaming performance is heavily affected, using a nerfed Snapdragon 8 Elite can’t help much either. The camera bump is also thinner but that doesn’t actually affect the quality much – except for the ultrawide angle camera.
But my conclusion remains the same. If you like this phone, then go for it. It’s priced at RM7,999 here in Malaysia and it is only available in the 512GB storage version. Pricy for sure, but that’s the price for the world’s thinnest book-style foldable device.
Where to buy? (Affiliate links)
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