Oppo Find N2 Flip Review: It's Pretty "Flipping" Good!

If you are looking for your first or next flip phone, the Oppo Find N2 Flip is here! It may not have a name that rolls right off your tongue, but it does have a sleek design with a large cover screen at an affordable price point!

Design

As usual, let's talk about the design. The N2 Flip adopts a clamshell folding design, much like most flip foldable, at just 7.45mm thin and 191 grams light. So you can fold it and have it in your pocket without feeling much of that bulk, especially for the guys. For the ladies, I'm sure most of you will carry them in your purses instead.

The N2 Flip comes in Astral Black and Moonlit Purple and personally, I do prefer the black variant more, and it has a matte surface compared to the glossy one on the purple. While it does fit the male demographic more, I chose to go with the purple one instead for the sake of this review.

Despite the purple variant having a glossy surface, fingerprints are very much unnoticeable due to the lighter colour. However, if you tend to have sweaty palms like me, you will have to frequently give it a good wipe with a microfibre cloth.

When folded, the N2 Flip seems to have a similar hinge and folding mechanism as the ZFlip 4; the differences are all internal with their self-engineered Flexion hinge. Although the ZFlip can hold its orientation at almost any angle, the N2 Flip will close or open itself once you fold it past roughly a 45 or 110-degree angle. On the bright side, this makes opening with one hand so much easier as the phone will help snap itself open past 110 degrees.

While closed, the N2 Flip has no gaps, unlike the ZFlip 4, making it seem slightly thinner in comparison. All differences aside, you will find similar button placements with the volume rocker and combined fingerprint and lock button on the top right side of the phone, which is natural considering the phone's ergonomics.

Display & Audio

The crease on the display is slightly less noticeable than the ZFlip 4, but we'll see how that fares in the long run. And speaking of "displays", the N2 Flip sports a 6.8-inch, 21:9 AMOLED panel with a refresh rate of up to 120Hz—just your typical AMOLED screen with decent vibrancy and brightness (up to 1,600 nits).

Where it gets interesting is its towering 3.26-inch cover screen, well, "towering" by cover screen standards at least. It's a 17:9 panel in portrait orientation which will likely be preferable to people expecting to set their custom images and photos as wallpapers. Oppo also included a bunch of live pet wallpapers that you can interact with and it will change what it's doing based on phone status and notifications!

The cover screen also supports always-on-display (AOD) and its own set of widgets for various functions. But unfortunately, at the time of review, the widgets selection is extremely limited at just six, hopefully, it will increase down the line. (With an exception for Spotify, which the user will need to have the app installed.)

Both the primary and cover screen supports face unlock, and that's about it for the display. Overall, I definitely appreciate the larger screen real estate, especially on the cover screen, although it may take some time for the widget library to grow.

On the audio front, nothing is going to blow you away. It's kitted with a pair of dual speakers which sounds average at best and muddy at worst. It does support Dolby Atmos for specific content, but even that only does a little to improve the speaker's performance. Regardless, average speakers aren't going to be that much of a deal breaker for most of you anyways, so slap a pair of earbuds on and call it a day.

ColorOS

Now on to ColosOS; as much as I'm fond of ColorOS and all the customizability that it brings, I do feel like I encountered more Oppo service prompts on the N2 Flip as compared to the Reno8 or Find X5 Pro, from app services to even having a separate app store alongside the Play Store, which could be confusing for users as it’s even able to update non-Oppo apps as well.

ColosOS also now includes "Hot Apps" recommendations in your home screen on set up, pretty annoying if you like to customise your home screens. Thankfully, it can be turned off relatively easily in the settings.

Nitpicks aside, ColorOS does have its set of nifty functions like a shelf for widgets and quick settings for gaming.

Performance

The N2 Flip houses a MediaTek Dimensity 9000+; while it underperforms in CPU benchmarks against the 8+ Gen 1, it fares much better on the GPU side.

Nevertheless, I rarely experience stutters and throttling in general usage or gaming. The only time I've experienced weird hiccups is during occasional unlocks when the display will flash uncontrollably and won't go away until I turn the phone off. Unfortunately, I've yet to discover the cause for this issue, so hopefully, it's only happening to my unit alone, or it will get fixed with a patch down the line.

While gaming, the phone will get noticeably warm on the top half, which is nothing out of the ordinary, given that the entire SOC and components are all packed there due to the folding design of the phone.

Battery

The bottom half of the phone houses its beefy 4300mAh battery, which is leaps and bounds ahead of other flip phones, and it shows, with the phone lasting well beyond a 9-hour working day with general usage, YouTube and a little bit of Diablo Immortals.

Now, we understand that battery life is difficult to quantify with many variables and use cases. Thus we are starting an interesting experiment known as the 10-hour YouTube test. We'll play a 10-hour-long video on YouTube with 50% brightness, location and Bluetooth off and see how each phone fares.

For starters, the N2 Flip did last through the video with 37% left on its battery. It isn't much to go on at the moment, but we'll try this experiment with more phones down the line, so stay tuned! Links are included in the description, so you can try it out with your phone as well if you have 10 hours to spare.

Oppo also included a 44W SUPERVOOC charger and USB A to C cable for juicing up your phone when it's low, which isn't something to be taken for granted by today. It can charge up your N2 Flip to full within an hour; sadly, it doesn't support wireless charging, which is an understandable compromise for the larger battery.

Camera

The N2 Flip sports a dual camera setup with a 50MP main and an 8MP ultrawide, along with a 32 MP front camera. For selfie lovers, you may use the cover screen to preview your main camera for it, reducing the front camera's use case to just video calls and face unlocking. There’s also a dual-screen preview feature which allows you to preview the camera feed on both the main and cover display, so for those of you with friends who are more particular about their photos, hopefully, this helps speed things up!

Image processing is handled by the all-familiar MariSilicon X, with a strong vibrancy and contrast. Portrait mode is a little rough around the edges, but generally, the camera performs okay in different situations; the ultrawide camera will lack finer details, and the front camera's photos look considerably softer compared to the main.

So the point I am trying to make is to use the main camera as much as possible.

The phone shoots up to 4K at 30FPS, video fidelity is average here, and if you are of a slightly older demographic, you can shoot the video like a camcorder, reliving the good old days!

Pricing & Availability

The Oppo Find N2 Flip is priced at S$1,299 or RM3,999 and is only available in its 8GB+256GB configuration in Singapore and Malaysia. The cheaper price point does make it the more appealing option compared to the ZFlip 4.

Although there are still a few kinks to iron out with this phone, there's definitely more to like about this phone than otherwise.