OPPO Find N3 Flip review: a loaded, stylish flip

Name: OPPO Find N3 Flip
Item: OPPO Find N3 Flip
Rating: 8
Author: Deepak Dhingra

Published On: October 21, 2023

Review Summary

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It’s a good time to be in the market for a new foldable smartphone since this segment is finally seeing some action and there’s some choice available. OnePlus has just jumped into the fray with a new book-style foldable and brands like Tecno and Motorola have contenders in the ring as well. And unsurprisingly, Samsung still occupies a strong position. OPPO seems to be doubling down, and just a few months after it launched its first foldable in the form of the Find N2 Flip (review) in the country, it’s bringing its successor, the Find N3 Flip to our shores. The foldable arena seems to have reached a stage where incumbents are trying to polish their offerings, adding features and improving upon the core aspects to make their devices compelling for potential buyers. The OPPO Find N3 Flip follows the same ethos, and brings with it a slew of improvements. Let’s flip it open to see what has changed this time around.

Table of Contents

Verdict

The OPPO Find N3 Flip comes as an evolutionary upgrade that builds upon the niceties offered by its predecessor and adds useful features like a telephoto camera and an alert slider to it. The UI does come with a lot of pre-installed apps and there’s no wireless charging, but the device scores high in cover screen usability, design, build, display, cameras and performance.

Design and display

The Find N3 Flip uses the same design blueprint we’ve seen with its predecessor and other flip phones so far, and then builds upon it with refinements and improvements. The sleek chassis fold flat without any unsightly gap in the middle, while the body is gently curved at the rear, imparting it a premium, luxurious feel. Apart from the large cover screen, the most prominent design element seems to be the large, circular camera module. Proudly carrying Hasselblad branding in the centre, the camera mpdule is encircled by a metallic ring (dubbed Cosmos Ring by OPPO), that gives it an industrial sort of a look and makes it stand out even more.

While the Find N3 Flip is available in a Sleek Black version, the Cream Gold I have with me for review does look quite premium with its pearlescent finish. Most buttons and ports are where they should be — volume rocker and power key on the right (when the flip is open), and a speaker, Type-C and SIM tray on the bottom. And on the left, there’s a new addition that comes in the form of an alert slider. Borrowed from OnePlus, this is a handy sliding key that lets you switch between ring, vibrate and silent modes quickly without having to wake up the screen or open the flip.

The main display is a 6.8-inch AMOLED panel that features 1-120Hz refresh rate, 1,440Hz PWM dimming, HDR10+ support and a peak brightness of up to 1600 nits. Unsurprisingly, it’s a lovely panel, with ample brightness, vibrant colours and fluid responsiveness. What’s surprising is the extent to which OPPO has been able to minimise the crease. The brand’s Flexion Hinge comes to the fore here, helping not only in reducing the visibility of the crease, but also enabling the gapless design and adding to the overall durability.

In fact, OPPO says the Find N3 Flip boasts better durability vis a vis its predecessor and offers 25 percent improvement in load-bearing strength. Now I can’t say I can verify that myself, but I’m wiling to believe TUV Rheinland’s Reliable Folding certification that says the Find N3 Flip can withstand 6,00,000 folds. That equals over 16 years of usage assuming you fold your phone 100 times a day. Even if Instagram-crazy users take that number to 200 folds per day, the usage time would come down to 8 years, which I’d say is more that enough. In order to prove how good I am with math, I will tell you that 400 folds a day will reduce the usage time to 4 years, which is still more than the life of the phone. But then I’d probably have something more to add regarding your phone usage too.

Cover screen

The cover screen and its usability is a key aspect of a foldable smartphone, and even more so for a flip-style foldable. And this is where the OPPO Find N3 Flip shines. The 3.26-inch AMOLED panel boasts 900 nits of peak brightness, a resolution of 720 x 382 pixels and 17:9 aspect ratio. Apart from your usual quick settings, notifications, and widgets, you can run full-blown apps on the cover screen, and not just the ones from OPPO.

The cover screen can actually work as a mini phone on which you can use apps like Gmail, WhatsApp, Telegram etc, not just to view emails and messages, but also to respond using a QWERTY keyboard. Google Maps can be used for navigation, while YouTube can serve your favourite videos. Granted the QWERTY keyboard feels cramped, but one can actually get by without having to open the flip. Then there are things like the virtual pets you get to play with, which have now grown into 3D, as compared to 2D versions before.

The cover screen also aids in delivering the FlexForm mode, which in this case, is especially useful from a camera perspective. You can enable cover screen preview to take selfies using the primary cameras, capture group shots using palm gestures, get creative with low angles, hold the phone half-open and camcorder-style to shoot video, etc. And these are all pretty useful too.

Cameras

The snappers on the Flip N3 are part of its key USPs, especially since OPPO has gone ahead and fitted a telephoto sensor on it, making it the first flip phone to boast a triple camera setup. On offer is a 50MP Sony IMX890 with f/1.8 and OIS, along with a 48MP Sony IMX581 with f/2.2 aperture and 114-degree FoV, and a 32MP IMX709 sensor with f/2 aperture that enables hybrid zooming up to 5X, said to be great for portraits. OPPO employs computational photography for fine-tune HDR photos, and its ProXDR feature claims to provide up to eight times more dynamic range. The selfie camera on the inner screen is a 32MP Sony IMX709 with f/2.4 aperture.

The whole gamut of shooting modes is available, including my favourite XPAN mode. This shoots wide images that can work wonders for sceneries and city shots, and can make any scene look quite dramatic depending upon how you frame, with its monochrome option proving to be especially useful in certain scenarios. Overall, the Find N3 Flip soots extremely good shots across different scenarios, with the additional telephoto sensor making the setup much more versatile than before. Images look good, with plenty of contrast and dynamic range. The N3 Flip does a great job with portraits and bokeh in general. Low-light images do look a tad soft, but still pretty good overall. The selfie camera does its job, but the best part is that you can just use the primary camera’s prowess to shoot selfies, and they look pretty good, especially if there’s ample ambient light available.

Performance, software and battery

With the flagship 4nm MediaTek Dimensity 9200 at its helm, 12 gigs of RAM and 256GB UFS 4.0 storage, the N3 Flip packs enough grunt to handle the heaviest of tasks. It’s smooth going all the way, whether you’re using the usual day-to-day apps, email, social apps, instant messaging, and the like, or heavier ones. Benchmarks indicate the same, with the CPU Throttle apps showing that the N3 Flip can sustain 70 percent of its peak performance running 50 threads for half an hour, which is quite good considering its slim profile. There’s hardly any heating as well.

On the software side of things, there’s ColorOS 13 working atop Android 13, offering the usual barrage of apps with tons of customisation options. This is one aspect where the N3 Flip could do with some improvement, as it comes with quite a few pre-loaded apps, some of which keep throwing up notifications that clutter the notification panel.

The 4,300mAh battery is par for the course for a slim flip phone, and as you might expect, might not hold up well if your usage is very heavy. For light to medium usage though, it can give you a day’s worth, and unless you rely more on the cover display to get things done during the day, you might need the charger by late evening. An 80W SuperVOOC charger is part of the pack, but the phone itself supports 44W. It takes the phone from nought to full in just about an hour.

Final Verdict

Priced at Rs 94,999, the OPPO Find N3 Flip can’t be called affordable, but it’s a premium flagship after all, and a foldable one at that… so the pricing isn’t much of a surprise. The closest competition is of course, the Samsung Galaxy Flip5, which is a very strong contender with good cameras and a comprehensive software ecosystem. It does score in software, and even offers an IP68 rating and wireless charging. However, it’s not so strong in other aspects like charging speeds, and cover screen usability. The fact that the Find N3 Flip is an evolutionary upgrade over its predecessor isn’t unexpected, but the good thing is that it does come with some handy additions that sweeten the deal.. the telephoto camera and the alert slider for instance. The software could do with a bit of a cleanup, and the lack of wireless charging is noticeable, especially at this price point. However, the handset scores in crucial aspects like cover screen usability, performance and cameras, with its build quality and hinge durability adding to its appeal. You should weigh your options if you’re looking for a stylish and premium flip phone, but you’d be amiss if you didn’t give this device a thorough once over before making up your mind.