Are Foldables Cooked?

(light rhythmic music) - All right, so I've been following and reviewing and defending foldable smartphones for a while now, basically since day one. I think they're sick. But I do have a question.

And it was mostly inspired by this thing. This is the new thinnest foldable in the world. It's the OPPO Find N5.

The double embargo is a bit of a red flag, but now that it's out, I can tell you that this phone is incredible from top to bottom on paper. It is a flagship, so Snapdragon 8 Elite, half a terabyte of storage, 16 gigs of RAM, a 50-megapixel primary camera, plus an ultra-wide and a telephoto, and somehow, a combined 5,600 milliamp hours of battery, despite being so ridiculously thin. And it's really the hardware and the build, this form factor, is where it shines.

So I remember when these phones first started coming out, the phones that were folding in half, again. And I remember saying that basically, for them to catch on, they have to be so good and so polished that it basically feels like a regular phone that happens to unfold into a tablet. That would be the goal.

And the first ones back then were nowhere near that. You remember the crazy bezels and the candy bar shapes. They didn't feel anything like a regular phone, but now, this Find N5 has come along.

And purely because of the hardware engineering, it can almost get away with basically feeling just like a regular phone. The outside screen is 6. 6 inches, and it's a totally normal, almost 21-by-nine aspect ratio too, with then bezels all the way around, literally just looks like a normal phone from the front.

The only giveaway might just be the slightly taller corners on the hinge side, but not by much. And then, thanks to the silicon carbide battery and a 3D-printed titanium hinge and a bunch of other advancements, the whole thing folded shut is just 8. 93 millimeters.

It's also decently light too, 229 grams. So 8. 9 millimeters and 229 grams.

The iPhone 16 Pro Max right now is 8. 3 millimeters and 227 grams. So this basically is just a big phone that happens to fold in half.

And when you unfold it, it gets even more ridiculous. This thing is razor-thin, almost like comically, impressively skinny when opened. So it's just one of those few rare devices where you can kinda just marvel at the fact that there's actually a working computer in there.

Now, technically, the HUAWEI Mate XT, the trifold, is a little bit thinner. So this is the world's thinnest book-style foldable. But either way, both of those phones had to develop special USB type C ports to make sure they'd fit on the side of the phone, because there really isn't much room for anything else around it.

But the screen inside is the largest we've seen yet in this style foldable, 8. 1 inches corner to corner, 412 pixels per inch, 120 hertz LTPO, nice even bezels all the way around with just a selfie camera cutout in the corner. It's awesome.

This is the best feeling, lightest eight-inch screen that you could possibly also fit in your pocket. And so the crazy stat, and this is kinda insane, is this has more screen area than an iPad Mini. And I was actually, I was thinking about that, and I was like, "Wait, holy crap, we did it.

" Like that was (laughing) the original goal, like the dream was to have an iPad Mini and be able to just like fold it up and put it in your pocket and take it with you. And now we have it. We actually have more screen than an iPad Mini.

And it's brighter and higher pixel density and a higher refresh rate, and it just looks better. This is more. But the problem is, it's a square.

See, well mathematically, it is more screen on this N5. Almost anything you'd actually want to do to take advantage of a large screen is still better on the iPad Mini. Like pull up the same YouTube video on each screen side by side and you can see how much bigger it still is on the iPad, thanks to those black bars on the square screen.

The biggest version of a keyboard on the iPad Mini is still way bigger. The biggest web browser or any media window, anything landscape, is still gonna be huge advantage for the iPad Mini. And so that is what got me down this path of thinking about these like, is this style of foldable cooked?

Now again, let's just, let's go back to the original premise, the original theory of what could make this book-style foldable successful. 'Cause we know that early ones were very niche, and obviously, early adopters would pick those up. But the goal someday is for this to be just a regular phone, and then it just happens to unfold into a tablet, right?

If you can get to that, mission accomplished, no downsides, it makes sense for regular people. So at the beginning, the downsides were, you know, they're twice as thick as regular phones. There's twice as much bezel as regular phones.

They're also twice as expensive as regular phones. There's so many more parts and so much more R&D. They're twice as complicated to build and make durable.

So let's say a future version of this phone comes along and somehow solves all of that, right? It's just as thin and light as a regular phone, even though it's a foldable. It somehow has the same battery life, the same flagship cameras.

It's even the same price, despite having twice as many screens. It would still be a tough sell because of the square thing. But then again, you've probably heard of Betteridge's law of headlines?

If you haven't, it basically states that any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered with no. So I guess that answers that. (laughing) But really, the nuance of that is that, at the beginning of foldables, we kinda felt like they're super promising, maybe they could be the no-brainer solution for everyone's smartphone, they could all be tablets.

But I think we've realized they're not all that, but they still definitely have a place for some people that want them. I mean, first of all, there's also flip phones, obviously, where the idea is to have a regular-sized phone that folds down into something smaller. There's definitely a market for that.

And then if you think about the iPad Mini thing, I still think, you know, obviously, if you fold an iPad Mini in half, that half-sized phone is gonna be really odd and awkward. But I still think people would want something like that too. But even just with these normal-sized phones that unfold into squares, there's still merit here.

I mean, not everyone's just watching videos, right? On pretty much all these book-style foldables, we've seen a bunch of window management tricks to make multitasking more productive. And this one's no exception.

So having two apps open side by side, even a third window floating above them. I honestly don't do this all the time, but when I do, sometimes for referencing info on one side and writing maybe a script or an email on the other, it's great. So there's still a benefit to this shape, and this form factor still has some target demographic.

So foldables aren't cooked. They're evolving and refining into smaller buckets. And certain companies and devices are doing a much better job of pushing the mold and figuring out what they're capable of than others.

And this Find N5 is definitely one of them for this shape. Hopefully you remember the first review of the year, where I talked about the three big pillars for new smartphones in 2025. This phone has all of them: the Snapdragon 8 Elite, the silicon carbide battery, and the ultra bright new displays.

But they're a little different in folding phones like this. So the chip obviously still performs great, but in a device this thin, you are limited on volume for a great cooling system. And I actually did find that this phone can get decently warm, and I even got it to overheat once during early testing, which is rare.

It's been years since I've said that about a new phone. This is the first time it's happened with the Snapdragon 8 Elite for me, and it's been one of the noted possible downsides of such a powerful new processor is you basically have to pair it with powerful new cooling. But yeah, other than that, performance has been incredible, as you'd expect.

The silicon carbide battery tech, again, also awesome in this phone. I said it earlier, but it's combined between these two razor-slim halves, 5,600 milliamp hours of battery. Just for context, my foldable phone of the year last year, the thicker Pixel 9 Pro Fold, had a combined 4,650 milliamp hour battery.

So it just feels like this type of thinness is only possible with this new battery technology. Plus then, of course, it's OPPO, so it also has 80-watt fast charging and 50-watt wireless charging. So flagship-type speeds.

And it has not just one, but two, ultra bright displays here. So the outside screen, when it's folded shut, feels the most like any normal flagship phone of any foldable. Mission accomplished there, 6.

6-inch diagonal, thin bezels, super responsive, high refresh rate, high resolution, all that stuff. And it's 1,600 nits max brightness. And the HDR number is something like 2,450 nits, something ridiculous like that.

So the whole thing is very viewable outdoors and in bright places, no compromises there. And then, there's a whole 'nother screen inside. This huge interior folding display gets up to 1,400 nits by itself and has a nice anti-reflective coating, and this crease is, I think, more subtle than ever.

This is one of the best-looking interior screens I've seen on a foldable. One of the noted weaknesses with foldables, even before they got freakishly thin like this, is there's just not enough room inside in that z-axis for flagship cameras. So the slab phones will have the best flagship cameras, and then the foldables would just be a notch below that with smaller sensors.

And as much as this thing has defied physics, it's also true about this one. You know, it does have this big, kinda ugly circle on the back housing a triple-camera system. The primary camera sensor is the closest they've gotten to a flagship.

It's the LYT-700. That's also featured in phones like the Find X8 and ROG Phone 9 and Moto Edge 50, other notably mid smartphone cameras. (laughing) And then, there's a 50-megapixel telephoto with macro and an eight-megapixel ultra-wide.

But still, even with all that, this phone is an engineering marvel. It's just so sick. This is what it looks like to push the currently available technologies to their, basically, to their limits.

It actually made me sad to see that OnePlus blog post about how they're not gonna do a foldable this year. Because I was thinking the whole time looking at this phone, this would make a sick OnePlus Open too, but now it looks like that's not coming, at least anytime soon. But yeah, let me know, I wanna know what you guys' thoughts are on foldables in this shape in general.

I think my two primary learnings from playing with the N5 are, one, holy crap we actually did it. We have iPad Mini-sized screens in our pockets, maximizing this shape. But two, I think the next thing we'd like to solve ideally is actually the price going down.

So it's this form factor, lower price, anyway. Curious to see your thoughts around the comments. Thanks for watching.

Catch you guys on the next one, peace.