Chinese smartphone firm Oppo launches slim $1,870 folding phone to rival Samsung, Huawei

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February 20, 2025
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Chinese smartphone firm Oppo launches slim ,870 folding phone to rival Samsung, Huawei

Oppo’s new Find N5 folding smartphone on display at a press briefing in London.

Ryan Browne | CNBC

Chinese smartphone firm Oppo has unveiled its new flagship folding phone Thursday, touting a slimmer body and artificial intelligence-focused features in a bid to compete with high-end foldable devices from the likes of Samsung and Huawei.

The company’s Find N5 phone that can fold in half, will retail at a starting price of 2,499 Singapore dollars ($1,867.70).

When it’s folded shut, the Find N5 looks like a normal bar-shaped phone with a 6.62-inch display. The device can then be folded outward to show a larger, 8.12-inch tablet.

Most notably, the phone has an ultra-thin design. When closed, it measures 8.93 millimeters thick, while when opened out in tablet form, the Find N5 has a depth of 4.21 millimeters.

That’s slimmer than Samsung’s Galaxy Fold 6, which the South Korean tech giant released last year.

Inside the device is a razer-thin 5,600 milliampere-hour (mAh) battery that’s no bigger than a credit card. Oppo said the battery incorporates a silicon-carbon material, which enables high battery capacity despite its small size.

Oppo is hoping it can win business from the likes of Samsung and Chinese tech giant Huawei, both major smartphone players seeking to shake the market out of an innovation slowdown with flashy new models that can bend.

AI assistant features

Like many other smartphone makers, Oppo is investing more into artificial intelligence-focused features on the device.

The Oppo Find N5 has a triple-camera setup that includes a telephoto lens that can zoom in up to 30x thanks to assistance from an AI-powered image enhancement feature, dubbed AI Telescope Zoom.

It also comes with a personal AI assistant that can interpret and summarize documents, generate summaries of phone calls and translate video calls and other content displayed on the screen.

Addressing concerns around privacy, Oppo said that some data is processed directly on the device while other information is stored in the cloud. In international markets, Oppo is using Google as its AI and cloud computing technology partner.

An Oppo spokesman told CNBC the company “strictly abides by local laws, regulations and privacy security protection requirements.”

Samsung recently launched additional AI capabilities on its new flagship Galaxy S25 series, including the ability to carry out tasks across multiple apps when prompted and integration of Google’s Gemini AI assistant.

Controlling a Mac with an Android phone

Oppo also talked up a new feature that enables users to connect their phone to a Mac computer. Using an app called O+ Connect, users can link the Find N5 to any Mac desktop machine and instantly transfer photos and other files between devices — so long as they’re connected to the same Wi-Fi network.

Users can also choose to remotely control a Mac from the Find N5. The Mac’s display can shut off and then reappear on the Find N5’s screen. The remote control feature only requires mobile internet or Wi-Fi to sync up a Mac device’s data with the Find N5 in real-time.

Huawei launches $3,660 trifold phone outside of China for the first time

The feature uses public macOS application programming interfaces, which enable two different apps to communicate with each other. Oppo said O+ Connect “fully complies with macOS platform and software regulations.”

Ben Wood, chief analyst at market research firm CCS Insight, told CNBC the Find N5 “shows the art of the possible when engineering a product with flexible display technology.”

Wood added that, while Huawei’s triple-screened Mate XT led to some fanfare, “commercially I think the smart money is still on the book-like form factor already offered by Samsung, Honor, Google and now Oppo.”

Samsung teased a trifold smartphone prototype at its January Unpacked event for the launch of the Galaxy S25. It’s not clear yet if the phone is a product Samsung will launch commercially anytime soon.