Oppo Announces Foldable Flagship Smartphone

It looks like Samsung is about to have some legitimate competition in the folding smartphone space.

Chinese smartphone manufacturer Oppo just announced their own foldable flagship smartphone, uniquely named the Find N, as announced by chief product officer Pete Lau in a company blog post.

Specs and official details are scant, but we won’t have to wait long to find out, as the folding smartphone releases on December 15. This date coincides with the second day of Oppo’s annual Inno Day event. 

As for form factor, the company tweeted a short video showing the phone in action. The folding mechanism looks similar to Samsung’s Z Fold devices, with a large internal folding screen combined with a smaller exterior screen that can be used like a regular smartphone. 

However, according to the video, this outer screen looks to have a similar aspect ratio to a traditional smartphone, unlike the Fold 3’s tall and thin external screen. 

"For a foldable smartphone, both the closed-screen and open-screen experience should be equally simple to use," Lau wrote. "Then, on top of that, we should create a groundbreaking efficient experience that a traditional smartphone cannot provide."

To that end, the Find N has been in development since 2018 and has gone through six prototypes. Oppo showed off one of these prototypes back in 2019, so this phone has been a long time coming. 

Oppo has been extraordinarily busy as of late. Just yesterday, it teased a smartphone with a retro-styled retractable camera lens.