Oppo Find N5 Review - Samsung just got Demolished!?

Oppo has just launched a foldable phone that's so thin it only just fits a USBC Port I'm not exaggerating the inside of a USBC Port is 2. 4 mm once you add in the structural housing you get to about 4 mm the Oppo Find N5 is 4. 2 mm thick when unfolded and somehow that's not even the best bit it's also meant to be much faster than the competition with a longer battery better cameras along with just a whole load of tech that no one expected like new signal enhancement the most powerful image generation that I've ever seen on a phone and even the ability to integrate into the Apple ecosystem so let's pin it head-to-head against Samsung who makes the best selling foldables to find out if Oppo is actually about to Massacre the market and right from the off Oppo lands its very first blow when it comes to the unboxing cuz this is what you get an 80 W charging brake a USB a Toc cable and a case which does feel premium but also very light I guess that makes sense since designing a phone like this and then slapping a chunk Meister case onto it would be very ironic now compare that to Samsung's package which literally just comes with the phone and a USBC cable you're getting about $80 of extra free value in the box with Oppo plus pre-installed screen protector on the front which is one of those things that probably cost them about 50 cents to do but to you the user it's one fairly major less thing that you need to worry about and you know what Oppo continues the onslaught when it comes to the build and it ain't close both phones have a pretty tough custom aluminium alloy frame they both got got fantastic feeling hinges that allow you to stop at almost any point in the motion but then it kind of feels like Oppo runs away with it their front display is imbued with ceramic which we've seen on quite a few phones does increase structural strength it's got better water resistance while Samsung's phone can take immersion this thing can go further and actually take High Press Jets and extreme temperatures to boot for my extreme lifestyle and just zooming out for a second the fact that it's even close let alone ahead and terms of durability is quite insane considering that Oppo is also almost 30% thinner in part thanks to some careful re-engineering of the motherboard it's 10 G lighter all while having a significantly less visible crease than Samsung Oppo is saying that the crease on this phone is 10% narrower and 50% shallower than the crease on their last phone which was already great it doesn't look that different to me but it's clearly vastly superior to the Samsung which you will notice every time you open the thing so yeah when you use this phone for the first time is absolutely one of those moments that just makes you peer back over at the Samsung and truly reconsider how much this company is actually trying the only two downsides on the Oppo are that one they've had to replace the glass on the back for a thinner fiber material which they've masked pretty well with this whole marbly texture but does still feel a little plasticky and then two that for some reason while Oppo decided to completely full send this thing in terms of water resistance they've actually got no certification in terms of dust resistance while well at the very least Samsung does have a basic ip4 rating but then you take the phones out into the real world and you start to notice something kind of unusual when it comes to battery so the Oppa uses a brand new type of battery that we've only really started seeing recently a silicon carbon battery with the highest silicon content so far you can think of silicon carbon batteries as just more energy dense than traditional lithium ion batteries and so what this means is that within less space this phone has managed to squeeze in a 5,600 Mah capacity compared to Samsung's 4,00 400 that's a massive difference now I did find that if you push both phones to their limit then the Oppo will still actually drain just as fast as a Samsung and that kind of makes sense given that the chip on this phone can draw more power and silicon carbon batteries are better at providing that power but if you assume average use bit of gaming bit of social media bit of browsing and music Oppo will Outlast Samy 10 times out of 10 not to mention the other flip side of this more conductive battery is faster charging while Samsung takes around 90 minutes to fully charge Oppo takes about 50 and remember in that time it's charging up a 25% bigger cell plus faster wireless charging too 50 W versus 15 watts which frankly is just embarrassing for Samsung since Oppo is doing all that with a new coil specifically made for the phone because it's 40% thinner than normal okay so that's four points to Oppo zero to Samsung but fine Samsung's got screens at least right I mean that's kind of what they do literally every TV in this house is a Samsung TV nope and it's really funny because Oppo has kind of just pulled a Samsung hair so when you open both phones up you'll immediately notice that oppos is the bigger screen it's higher resolution and it's largely speaking creaseless but as well as that you know that anti-reflective screen coating that Samsung's kind of become famous for on their S Series flagships well Oppo has employed something very similar on their inner display here and Samsung hasn't this isn't quite as effective as the anti-reflective coating Samsung uses on their bar phones but it's better than the no coating that they have on their foldables actually making Oppo now the one with the more readable screen oh yeah and the Oppo also has the better cover screen on the front see if you look at Samsung in isolation it feels like they're making really good progress here their first foldable look like this and each generation we've seen this cover screen get a little bigger a little closer to the edges and the hinge on the side being pulled in to more and more closely resemble just a normal bar phone but it's only when you put it side by side with the Oppo that you're reminded oh yeah this this is a bar phone Oppo is wide enough to feel like a genuinely natural aspect ratio for typing it weighs almost the exact same as a standard iPhone 16 Pro Max and it's got normal phone thickness too so I don't feel like I'm carrying around a third leg in my pocket and so seeing that you can have all of that that suddenly reminds you Samsung isn't quite there I don't really like these two weird looking corners and also Samsung's displays are a bit brighter when you're Outdoors but you know if I had to pick one I would still on balance prefer the oppos set of screens so it's turning into a bit of a blood bath right now what about performance yeah the Oppo has that too the things using the Next Generation Snapdragon 8 Elite chip as opposed to the Samsung which uses last year's chip this is basically powered by the thing that you could expect Samsung's next foldable that will come out in the summer to be powered by and so it's not hugely surprising to see that it came out a good 35% faster when we run a stress test but the thing that I thought was even more interesting here is that even though Oppo is the one that's rocking the higher power consumption chip that performance Gap only widened with prolonged use cuz by the end of this stress test it was actually 50% faster than Samsung which is frankly Bonkers it felt like such a huge jump that I had to rerun the stress test again to find not quite as large a gap but still 40% by the end of the test now there's a pretty decent chance that you'll never even notice that 30 to 40% Gap because just scrolling around the homepages Samsung is often the one that can feel a bit snappier just down to the way they've tuned their animations but to me it does feel like in all the areas where speed is important like how fast apps open when you click them and how fast your camera shutter can capture shots and how fast your image processing applies after you've taken those shots Oppo is generally ahead so what about the software I have to say the way that Oppo handles multitasking it Remains the gold standard so let's say for example that you're on Netflix and then you also want a browser tab to do a little shopping on the side bam you can do both in their opt optimal aspect ratio is fully open at once but now you decided what you fancy watching is Drgon Ball Z search on Netflix oh it's not there so let's pull up our sponsor surar VPN you just drag the icon into the mix and all of a sudden three different apps all open at the same time and all I need to do now is to go into surf shark to change my location to Japan it's genuinely as simple as that and now if we pop back to Netflix it will reload and Drgon Ball Z there it is we can click it we can watch it it completely opens up the content that you can get into and it ramps up cuzz then let's say that you've decided what it is that you want to buy over here now you're left with the incredibly fiddly task of adding your details in except it's not fiddly at all here thanks in part to this phone's insane multitasking and in part Sur shark which also comes with an alternate ID feature anytime that you want to sign up to a site that you're not completely sure about it generates an entirely new online identity for you that's immediately copiable which means you can still get your Communications forwarded to your real email for example just without revealing those details to companies that you don't trust go to Surf shark.

com boss and use the code boss to get surf shark for less than $3 a month with an extra 4 months for free and a 30-day money back guarantee so the multitasking is sick and there's a few more things that Oppo software does that just feel clever like file doc basically just a dump to drop anything of interest that you're trying to collect together to put into an email or share into a WhatsApp group it's basically just a clipboard but done in a very intuitive way that actually saves you time and then You' got this whole Oppo o plus connect thing thing which to their credit probably is the easiest way that I've used on Android to send full quality files complete with all metadata to an iPhone with no Wi-Fi connection but equally let's be very honest this is still a long shot from native Apple integration while also feeling very much like a knockoff version of Apple solution and I think just generally that is one of the things that I don't like about this software it feels a little cheap like you go into an app folder you get recommended apps at the bottom if this was a $200 fair enough but not at these kind of prices sometimes those recommended apps just fail to load which looks even worse oppo's app market pings you to get your attention and even when you eventually give in and accept it's not a very intuitive app to be navigating at all which does make me feel like Samsung software is more sophisticated and while this phone doesn't yet have the One ui7 update knowing that it will get it and just how much I love that software does make me Veer towards Uncle Sam in this category all finished off by the fact that Samsung has a definitively better ecosystem of surrounding products if you're outside of China and 7 years of major Android version upgrades OPP phones 10 to get four it's pretty much the same story when it comes to AI features like this Oppo phone is doing some very interesting stuff like you can pull up any photo on this phone click enhance Clarity boom straight up detail upgrade and the thing's got this whole separate app called AI Studio which is very cool and very strange so you get a bunch of free credits when you buy the phone and then you can spend those credits doing things like inserting yourself next to celebrities it works kind of although I am curious are people using stuff like this to make it seem like they actually met those people and if they're not then what are they doing with it I've managed to turn myself into a rather handsome if I might say pirate this is powerful AI hence the credits to stop people spamming it and it's not just creating brand new images you can also reimagine existing images into new Styles and it is very very effective highest quality image generation I've seen baked into a phone interesting though that it's given drisha an entirely new ethnicity there's a good chance that this is just down to how the AI has been trained and aside from that just generally across the phone let's not forget that Oppo has a lot of equivalents to Samsung's AI features like let's say you're in a document just like Samsung there's a whole load of writing tools oppo's got AI replies for messages they've even got an AI that can write Instagram captions for you at the same time I really hope it doesn't come to me having to use that it's just that on average oppo's implementation feels about a year behind a lot of the AI features are either coming soon or they're quite situational they work sometimes and then for some reason not at other times I mean let's not kid ourselves I wouldn't exactly call Samsung's AI reliable but at the same time if I had to lean on one of these I would still rather lean on this and similarly one of the things Oppo is boasting loudest about with this phone is link boost this AI system combined with a 360° antenna architecture which should improve signal by 20 to 30% in Weak areas but I've tested it multiple times in multiple locations and I can't see any consistent tangible benefit over the Samsung which makes me feel like you probably won't notice the difference either okay just before we finish this off with the cameras I do just want to mention speakers cuzz they're important to me one thing that you will just generally notice as Tech gets thinner is speakers get worse because they have less space to be able to push air to create the sound and that's the case here oppo's done a good job I'd say to make it not suck but it definitely lacks the satisfying richness of Samsung speakers now cameras are one area that I was expecting Oppo to absolutely destroy Samsung at but when you use this thing you realize that cameras are one thing that Oppo has majorly compromised on on this phone specifically to hit their thinner gos the main camera is decent but I do think Samsung has more true- tolie colors and also it's just a bit more flattering Oppo has this quite crunchy contrasty look that I don't think is for everyone the ultra wide camera on Oppo is just bad it's an 8 megapixel camera compared to Samsung's 12 and that is a massive resolution Gap oppos just doesn't even look Fit For A 2025 phone that said Oppo does have a better internal selfie camera than Samsung which is I mean it's not hard I'm pretty sure my fridge has a better camera than this thing since Samsung decided to go for an under display camera that's capped at four I repeat four megapixels and Oppo also has better Zoom both have three times optical zoom but oppo's three times optical zoom camera is 50 megap compared to Samsung's 10 and boy you can tell there is some more fake AI enhancement going on on Oppo but even just that aside you can tell there's more information too also shout out to Oppo for turning this Tel photo zoom camera into the macro camera too cuz most phones just use their Ultra wide camera but Oppo has given this tele photo camera a super short focusing distance so it fills that role instead of the ultrawide and this is the way to go you get less distortion on your subject when you're shooting from further away and it also means that you can just get closer without physically needing to get closer which is less fiddly and you're blocking less of the light on that subject this Samsung doesn't even have a proper macro mode that said nothing beats Samsung's portrait mode and its ability to detect depth can you see how Oppo has decided to blur this entire phone booth as if it's really far away from me except for those two stickers interesting choice Oppo so cameras are about a draw the camera app on the Oppo is smoother which is a nice plus but it's not a consistently better camera than Sammy and so that leaves us with a score 6. 5 points to 3.