When OPPO officially launched the Find N3 Flip in the Philippines, we wondered whether it was an iterative upgrade over the previous model or a more meaningful and convincing one.

After weeks of using OPPO’s latest flip-style phone, we finally have an answer — and, no, we don’t think the company has a revolutionary foldable in its stable. But the Find N3 Flip is certainly a notable improvement over what came before, and the changes here are enough to make it the best in its class.

In the Philippines, the OPPO Find N3 Flip has a suggested retail price of P64,999 (around $1,174 converted) for 12GB of RAM and 256GB of built-in storage. Cream Gold and Sleek Black are your color options.

Visually, the OPPO Find N3 Flip looks a lot like the original, the OPPO Find N2 Flip, which debuted the brand’s clamshell foldable with a large rectangular cover screen. The dimensions are identical, and the latest Flip is also made of plastic and aluminum. Even the screen sizes of the external and inner displays are exactly the same.

However, it’s worth noting that OPPO has added IPX4 splash resistance this time around, so you can use it freely in light rain without worrying about water damage. Not to mention, a splash-resistance rating is something we rarely see on a foldable phone. The FInd N3 Flip also upgrades to Corning’s Gorilla Glass Victus — from Gorilla Glass 5 on the previous generation — to provide better protection against accidental bumps and drops.

There’s a new alert slider on the left-hand side, allowing you to switch between Silent, Vibrate, and Ring modes quickly. This is something that has remained mostly consistent with OnePlus designs, and we’re happy to see the physical switch on the side of the OPPO Find N3 Flip. It has a distinct texture, too, so it’s quite easy to identify in your pocket and seamlessly slide into its different positions with one finger.

Another notable change is the camera module at the back. Whereas the original Flip had two cameras, with the secondary camera sporting an ultrawide lens for landscapes, cityscapes, and group shots, the Find N3 Flip features a circular camera island with Hasselblad branding alongside three lenses, adding a dedicated telephoto option with 2x optical zoom — a first for a flip-style device — while also upgrading the ultrawide to a 48-megapixel sensor.

You still get a 32-megapixel punch-hole camera for selfies, but we think the phone’s rear-facing cameras give you plenty more options when it comes to photos and videos and do a better job in both day and night scenes. That is, as long as you don’t mind using a much smaller screen as your viewfinder. And, yes, we think the OPPO Find N3 Flip is the best flip phone we’ve used for taking pictures and shooting videos, surpassing even the Samsung Galaxy Z Flip5, which lacks a telephoto shooter.

OPPO’s upgraded Flexion Hinge design deserves special mention as well. It uses aircraft-grade steel for durability and boasts a 25% increase in drop resistance compared to the Find N2 Flip.

More impressively, German firm TÜV Rheinland recently certified the Find N3 Flip (and Find N3) to withstand 1 million folds, smashing previous records established by other foldable phones. When OPPO announced the Find N3 Flip in the Philippines, we were told that it would be able to fold reliably at least 600,000 times. It tested better than expected. Based on the company’s latest claim, you should be able to open and close your phone 100 times per day for over 16 years — which is a lot more than its expected lifespan.

Obviously, we have no way to test the endurance of the OPPO Find N3 Flip’s hinge, but on a more positive note, we found fewer reasons to open and close it compared to other flip phones we’ve tested. That’s simply because the device’s 3.26-inch AMOLED cover screen practically gives you two devices in one form factor, similar to how vertical foldables are like a mashup between a phone and a tablet.

That wasn’t the case with clamshell designs before. OPPO changed the game with last year’s Find N2 Flip and improved on the formula in many ways with its latest release. Notably, more apps can be accessed on the Find N3 Flip’s outer display; TikTok, X (formerly Twitter), Gmail, YouTube Music, and Grab can all be opened on the smaller screen, and we didn’t run into any problems using them as we would on a regular smartphone display.

If you’re up for it, you can even stream your favorite Netflix shows and YouTube content on this small panel — with HDR support to boot. It’s a feature we found useful, and even though this might sound crazy, watching certain videos on the OPPO Find N3 Flip’s external panel is something we would miss badly once we move on to using other devices as our daily driver.

We found the screen particularly useful when streaming product and game reviews that don’t require our full, undivided attention, and background play is supported on both YouTube and YouTube Music. Since Google Keep is one of the apps you can launch on the cover display, you can use it to save QR codes, grocery lists, and other to-do items for quick and convenient access without needing to flip open the phone.

And even though it’s not our cup of tea, we can certainly see some users spending tons of hours watching TikToks on the outer display, which is perfectly suited for videos shot in the portrait orientation. If you’re more of a casual gamer, then the preloaded GameSnacks app is a must-try, especially when you feel like playing fun, straightforward, and fast-loading games to pass the time once in a while.

The small AMOLED panel remains impressively bright, too, offering up to 900 nits of max brightness, according to OPPO. It’s perfectly legible outdoors owing to the sufficient brightness and decent resolution of 382 x 720 pixels.

As for the foldable AMOLED display, it measures 6.8 inches across and uses LTPO technology to ensure optimum battery usage, as it allows the panel to intelligently switch between 1Hz and 120Hz depending on the screen content. It offers a resolution of 2,520 x 1,080 pixels, which makes for a particularly tall 21:9 aspect ratio. To top it all off, the main display boasts HDR10+ and 240Hz touch sampling, as well as 1,440Hz PWM dimming and 1,600 nits of peak brightness.

You get three refresh modes on the OPPO Find N3 Flip — Standard, High, and Auto, with the latter dropping down the refresh rate to 60Hz when playing games and during video playback to save battery.

At the back, the Find N3 Flip sports three high-end cameras, just like most flagship smartphones out there. The primary camera packs an optically stabilized 50-megapixel Sony IMX890 sensor 1.0µm pixels and a Quad-Bayer color filter, so it’s designed to save 12.5-megapixel images by default.

The dedicated 2x telephoto camera, on the other hand, has a 32-megapixel Sony IMX709 sensor with an RGBW color filter. This 47mm-equivalent zoom camera also supports up to 5x magnification, thanks to OPPO’s In-Sensor Zoom technology. Meanwhile, the ultrawide features a 48-megapixel Sony IMX581 sensor with 0.8µm pixels for better low-light capabilities. And the ultrawide comes with autofocus and pulls double duty as a macro shooter, starting from 4cm away.

The punch-hole camera for selfies is the same as the original’s, so you’re looking at a 32-megapixel Sony IMX709 sensor with a 21mm-equivalent fixed-focus lens with an f/2.4 aperture. It offers three zoom levels — 0.8x, 1x and 2x — and the resulting photos look generally okay, if not soft or lacking in detail due to the upscaling OPPO applies.

On a more positive note, the main camera takes excellent photos especially in well-lit conditions, capturing a healthy amount of details while also offering accurate colors, plenty of contrast, and wide dynamic range. The white balance is mostly spot-on. In fact, all three cameras on the rear can capture high-quality photos with a natural look and the right amount of sharpening in the default mode. Even without a periscope lens, the 5x hybrid zoom images we shot on the telephoto camera look good, too.

Portrait mode offers two zoom levels — 1x and 2x. The latter is hugely useful when it comes to shooting portraits, as taking 2x zoom photos results in more true-to-life body proportions and shallower depth of field. But no matter which zoom level you prefer, the subject separation is usually precise, while the background blur looks convincing enough.

Taken with the rear camera system

Selfies shot on the rear camera

Captured on the front camera

For videos, all cameras on the OPPO Find N3 Flip support 4K video recording at up to 30 frames per second. Electronic image stabilization is present across all cameras, too, and it works as intended when available. The 4K output from the primary camera, in particular, looks great in good lighting and gives the competition a run for the money.

For flagship-level performance, OPPO has kitted the Find N3 Flip with a 4nm MediaTek Dimensity 9200 SoC. The 5G chip brings many improvements over the Dimensity 9000 inside the Find F2 Flip and has similar CPU and GPU cores to the Dimensity 9200 Plus found in high-performance devices like the Xiaomi 13T Pro, except the latter operates at higher clock speeds. Not to worry, as this clamshell foldable is perfectly capable of running demanding games like Genshin Impact and Diablo Immortal at 60 frames per second with the graphics cranked all the way up.

With a generous 12GB of RAM, multitasking is a breeze. Whether you’re flipping through social media feeds, browsing the web, streaming music or videos, or running resource-intensive apps, the OPPO Find N3 Flip delivers a lag-free experience. The unit we have for this review also comes with 256GB of fast UFS 4.0 storage and boots Android 13-based ColorOS out of the box.

As far as foldable phones go, very few are capable of outperforming the Find N3 Flip. But even then, the difference is probably negligible in real-world conditions. In Antutu Benchmark, our unit achieved an overall score of 932,498 in Performance mode. Moving to the Geekbench 6 test, which evaluates the CPU performance, the OPPO Find N3 Flip scored 1,124 in the single-core test and a respectable 3,259 points in the multicore test.

Like the previous generation, the OPPO Find N3 Flip is equipped with a 4,300mAh battery that supports 44-watt SUPERVOOC fast charging despite shipping with a 67-watt charger. The phone can go from zero to full capacity in just 50 minutes, and that’s about as good as you could hope for in the clamshell category. Reverse charging is supported as well.

While the battery capacity might not boast the biggest numbers on the market, you can get a lot more mileage if you use the cover screen for basic apps like Gmail, YouTube Music, and X. It is for this reason that we could easily get more than 5 hours of on-screen time on the Find N3 Flip with about 20% left in the tank, which is what we usually get on a regular flagship phone, barring any issues with the software or hardware components.

On one occasion, we played Diablo Immortal for 40 minutes nonstop with the graphics set to the highest quality, and it drained by 11%. In our experience, foldable phones tend to have shorter battery life than their non-folding counterparts, but we’re happy to report this isn’t the case here, as long as you use the smaller outer display occasionally.

Final thoughts

When OPPO launched the Find N3 Flip, the company described it as the best flip phone consumers could get their hands on. And after weeks of use, we found ourselves wholeheartedly agreeing with OPPO’s sentiment. Not only does the Find N3 Flip set the gold standard for cover-screen functionality, image quality, and battery life and wired charging, it’s also just as fast and capable as any high-end smartphone with a flat or curved panel.

OPPO knocked it out of the park with only its second clamshell foldable, and we could only hope that other companies are taking notes.

Online availability: Shopee, Lazada, and TikTok Shop

OPPO Find N3 Flip specs

• 6.8-inch AMOLED foldable display, 2,520 x 1,080 resolution, 120Hz refresh rate, 240Hz touch sampling, 1,600 nits brightness, UTG glass protection
• 3.26-inch AMOLED cover display, 720 x 382 resolution, 60Hz refresh rate, 120Hz touch sampling, 900 nits brightness, Corning Gorilla Glass Victus 2
• 4nm MediaTek Dimensity 9200 processor
• Mali-G715 MP11 GPU
• 12GB LPDDR5X RAM
• 256GB/512GB UFS 4.0 storage
• Triple 50-megapixel main, 48-megapixel ultrawide, 32-megapixel telephoto rear cameras with Hasselblad image tuning, MariSilicon X NPU
• 32-megapixel front camera
• Side fingerprint reader
• 4,300mAh battery with 44-watt SuperVOOC charging
• ColorOS 13.2 based on Android 13
• Color options: Moonlight Muse and Mirror Night

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