Oppo Find N2 Flip review: new hinge decreases the crease

The next-gen flipper costs £849, undercutting Samsung by £50, and uses a different type of hinge that aims to help solve one of the most obvious flaws with folding phones: the crease in the middle of the screen.

The phone is only splash-resistant, not submersible, as is the industry standard. Oppo offers no formal dust-resistance rating for the N2 Flip, but has built multiple protections from dust into the back of the hinge. The phone is also rated to last more than 400,000 folds, which is more than 100 openings and closings every day for 10 years.

Unusually for an Android phone of this price, the N2 Flip has a MediaTek Dimensity 9000+ chip, rather than one from Qualcomm. On paper, it is slower than the chips in rivals from the last two years, but on the whole it performed well, felt snappy and carried out tasks just fine, with a little stutter here and there in some graphically intensive games.

Battery life is very good for a folding phone, generally lasting up to about two days between charges when used mostly on wifi with the main screen on for about five hours plus a couple of hours used on 5G while out and about. Longer stretches on 5G in congested areas shortened battery life by about half a day, but that is still far longer than the Samsung Z Flip 4, which only lasts 31 hours under similar conditions.

Oppo rates the batteries to maintain at least 80% of original capacity for at least 800 full charge cycles.

The phone is generally repairable by Oppo in the UK, with a replacement battery costing £72. The company operates a trade-in scheme and publishes yearly sustainability reports, but not for individual products. The Find N2 Flip does not include recycled materials.

While the cover screen generally works fine, the display is almost always upside down when you fold the phone or pick it up from a desk, requiring a second or so to rotate itself when you pick it up.

The N2 Flip has a main 50-megapixel and 8MP ultrawide camera on the outside and a 32MP camera on the inside screen.

The 32MP selfie camera is pretty good as these things go, but you also have the option of shooting using the main camera with the phone closed, which works well.

Overall, the cameras on the N2 Flip are nothing to write home about, lagging most high-end competitors at this price but perfectly fine for general snaps.

The Oppo Find N2 Flip costs £849 and will ship on 2 March in black or purple.

The N2 Flip excels at putting a large screen into your pocket in a compact folding package. It looks and feels the part, keeping all the novelty of the clamshell phone, but improving on previous designs, with its water-drop hinge reducing the crease in the screen. It lasts far longer than other folding flip phones on battery and feels snappy in day-to-day usage.

The big cover screen on the outside is handy, but feels under-utilised, with limits on what you can do with it. The general software needs polishing for this premium price, too. The camera is fine, but not up to the same standard as you would find on similarly priced phones. There is certainly room for improvement.