OPPO Find N3 review: Challenger approaching

OPPO Find N3 Review: The Verdict

The OPPO Find N3 is the tablet-style foldable to beat, thanks to great cameras and a form factor that just makes sense. The sky-high asking price makes it a hard sell, however, and as such, it's unlikely to convince foldable sceptics.

What we love

Excellent form factor
Almost no display crease
Great camera

What could be improved

Prohibitively expensive
Not fully water-resistant
No wireless charging

The essentials

Performance: Super zippy. No complaints.
Battery: The best battery we've seen on a foldable. Expect around five hours of screen time per charge with a balanced mix of internal and external. That's roughly a full day of moderate usage with a slight buffer.
Screen: Gorgeous displays, inside and out. The external display has a sensible aspect ratio, which makes it more usable than rivals. The internal display has almost eliminated the dreaded crease entirely.
Camera: Great, but not as good as what you'd find on other flagship phones. The Find N3 can take lovely photos in most situations, but doesn't match the latest iPhones or Pixels in low-light performance.

85/100

$2,699

One of my core beliefs is that competition in consumer tech is a good thing. A well-made product is not only good for fans of the brand, but can push an entire category forward.

OPPO introduced the idea of long-range periscopic zoom, which is now commonplace in flagship phones. Huawei had the first night mode, and now you won't find a phone without it. Even if you've never bought an OPPO or Huawei phone, you've likely benefitted from their innovations.

Conversely, there's less incentive to innovate without competition. Samsung has seen very little competition in the tablet-style foldable space, and it shows: the last three generations of the Galaxy Z Fold have been pretty samey.

Enter the OPPO Find N3. The Find N3 is the first tablet-style foldable not made by Samsung to get a wide release. Previous Find N models have been exclusive to China, much like a lot of Samsung's other would-be competitors. Similarly, the Pixel Fold has been limited to just the US, the UK, Germany, and Japan.

Meanwhile, the Find N3 (known as the OnePlus Open in some markets) will effectively be available globally - including in Australia. That level of distribution makes it harder to dismiss the Find N3. Not only is it competing in the same markets as Samsung, it's also a better product.

Objectively correct

The Find N3 is objectively the correct form factor for a tablet-style foldable. Instead of a weirdly tall and narrow external display, as we've seen on the Galaxy Z Fold family, the Find N3 has a fairly conventional 6.3-inch screen. Unsurprisingly, this makes it feel just like any other phone. As such, the Find N3 is a lot more useful when it's in "phone" mode. It's not cramped, and you don't have to relearn to type on a new aspect ratio.

When you unfold the Find N3, it becomes a 7.8-inch tablet. That’s ever-so-slightly larger than the Galaxy Z Fold 5's internal display, but the more significant difference is the lack of a crease. While Samsung's foldables still have very pronounced creases in the middle of the display, it's all but invisible on the Find N3. You can still notice a crease looking at the Find N3 from extreme angles, but you won't see it in day-to-day use.

You can also barely feel the crease. There's a slight dip if you run your finger over it, but it's a massive improvement over what we've seen from competing devices. While a display crease probably won't be the defining reason you purchase one phone over another, I'd still prefer less crease than more.

Ergonomically, the Find N3 is pretty heavy for a phone, but light for a tablet. It's impossible not to notice the Find N3's heft when using the external display, thanks to its 239g weight. Even as someone who uses the 221g iPhone 15 Pro Max as their primary device, using the Find N3 felt surprisingly heavy. This changes as soon as you open it, however. When unfolded, the Find N3 is lighter than you'd expect. While you naturally have to use two hands to type, it's easy enough to hold onto one handed for extended periods of time.

The Find N3 features a physical toggle for switching the phone between ring, vibrate, and quiet. It's not something we tend to see on Android phones, and it's satisfying to fidget with - even if I never want my phone to actively make noise.

On the software side, I'm a big fan of the Find N3's multi-tasking interface. There's a fairly standard multi-tasking mode where you can have two apps open side-by-side, but there's also a nifty feature OPPO calls "Boundless View". With Boundless View, you can have up to three apps open at once, with one taking up the majority of the screen. The other two jut out, and you can swipe to bring them into focus.

It's a clever solution to multi-tasking on a small display, and a lot more useful than just having two apps open on the display at once. It doesn't make to have Slack taking up screen real-estate when you're not actively using it, for example, but it's great to just be able to swipe up to be able to see the app, and then swipe down to return to what you were previously doing. While there's a bit of a learning curve to it, Boundless View is a great innovation.

Best in class, but not overall

Photographic prowess is a key part of OPPO's pitch for the Find N3, and look, the camera is solid. It's not on the same level as the iPhone 15 Pro or Pixel 8 Pro, but it still takes great photos in most circumstances. I've taken stunning portraits, nabbed sharp shots of my endlessly energetic dog, and got lovely depth of field when shooting food.

The main trade-off the Find N3 camera makes is low-light performance. Even dim lighting is enough for night mode to kick in, which can lead to blur - especially if there's a subject in the photo. This means low-light photos can require a few takes to get a good result, but the effort tends to be worth it.

Similarly, the 3x zoom also works best in good lighting. You can still get a decent shot as it gets darker, but you start to lose detail and see blur. This is especially noticeable if you punch into 6x.

OPPO Find N3 camera samples

Check out these camera samples taken on the Find N3. Click or tap on any photo to see a larger version.

It's also worth calling out the camera bump. It takes up around a third of the back, and protrudes a solid few millimetres. While Find N3 will never sit flat, I don't have the overall aesthetic. It's a bold choice, and one that gives the phone a bit of an identity.

In terms of battery, you can expect around five hours of screen time per charge (tested while constantly connected to a 5G network). This came with a roughly even split of using the Find N3 open and shut. That's around a full day of moderate usage with a small buffer.

If you prefer to use the Find N3 as a tablet, you might see the battery drop closer to around four hours of screen time per charge. That should still get moderate users through a day, but power users may be in need of an early top-up. Thankfully, the Find N3 has OPPO's patented fast charging. A 30-minute charge will take the phone from flat to 80%. This does rely on using the official charger you get in the box. Charging speeds will be slower with a third-party charger.

Five hours of screen time per charge is kinda mid; it's the baseline of what I want to see from a device in 2023. While the Find N3 battery isn't particularly excellent, is still better than what I've achieved with the same kind of testing on the Galaxy Z Fold family, where I was getting between three and four hours of screen time per charge.

A few omissions

While the Find N3 is a hell of a phone, there are a few areas in which it falls short. The first is water resistance; the phone is only rated IPX4, which is a step down from the IPX8 rating Samsung foldables come with. IPX4 means the Find N3 will comfortably survive splashes and getting caught in the rain, but can't be fully immersed in water.

Given we're now seeing full water resistance on phones as cheap as the Pixel 7a, it's not a great look on a $2,699 handset. At the same time, IPX4 should still be more than enough for most of us. The Find N3 just probably isn't the best phone for you if you like to doom scroll in the bath.

The other key missing feature is wireless charging. OPPO hasn't always been consistent with whether it includes wireless charging, thanks to its speedy wired charging tech. From a personal perspective, I don't care whether a phone has wireless charging - I'm a plug my phone in at the end of the day kind of guy. I get the argument that a phone this expensive should have wireless charging, but I think it's a small omission in the scheme of things.

And of course, there is the matter of price. $2,699 is a lot of money to spend on a phone. Sure, $2,699 is cheaper than what you'd pay for a 512GB Galaxy Z Fold 5, but the Find N3 is still one of the most expensive handsets you can buy in Australia. To further complicate matters, the only way to buy the Find N3 is outright - it's not being sold on a mobile plan in Australia, so you can't pay it off over 24 or 36 months.

OPPO Find N3 - Final Thoughts

The Find N3 is a stunning piece of tech that pushes foldables forward. If you're after a tablet-style foldable (and you're not prone to dropping your phone in water), this is the one to buy.

But despite being the best example of the form factor to date, the Find N3 won't convince many non-believers that a foldable should be their handset. It's still a hard sell given the price and the compromises it makes. If you're not already mostly all-in on the idea of a device that's both a phone and a tablet, the Find N3 probably isn't going to change your mind.

It's expensive, the camera - while great - still doesn't match non-foldables, and you miss out on full water resistance and wireless charging. At $2,699, what could be a small compromise on a cheaper phone can become a much larger issue.

While the Find N3 isn't the right phone for most, it's a win for everyone - in the big-picture sense. Samsung's Galaxy Z Fold family has become iterative; as my colleague Fergus said in his review, "the Galaxy Z Fold 5 has gone from being the coolest piece of tech Samsung makes to one that’s getting alarmingly close to being boring".

The category needs competition, and OPPO has delivered in spades, outclassing Samsung in most key areas. Anyone interested in a tablet-style foldable now has a cool alternative thanks to OPPO, and Samsung has a reason to try harder. Both of those are good things.

Looking further forward, competition could also lead to cheaper tablet-style foldables. It's certainly done the trick in the flip-style foldable space, where devices launched as high at $2,699, but are now available for under $1,000.

But coming back to here and now, the Find N3 is the best tablet-style foldable you can buy. The form factor simply makes more sense, and leads to a better day-to-day experience. And if you're going to spend $2,699 on a foldable, you may as well buy the one with the least compromises.