Review of the flagship folding smartphone Oppo Find N3

Oppo Find N3 is the third in the line of clamshells from the brand, a direct successor to the Find N2 model, which stood out on the market with its unusual dimensions. Find N3 has become more compact, but has significantly expanded its technical capabilities. Today, this is one of the most powerful devices in its class for photo and video shooting.

• SoC Qualcomm SM8550-AB Snapdragon 8 Gen2, 8 processor cores (1×Cortex-X3 @3.2 GHz + 2×Cortex-A715 @2.8 GHz + 2×Cortex-A710 @2.8 GHz + 3×Cortex- A510 @2.0 GHz)
• GPU Adreno 740
• Operating system Android 14, ColorOS 14
• Internal display OLED, 7.82″, 2268×2440, 426 ppi, 120 Hz
• External display OLED, 6.3″, 1116×2484, 431 ppi, 120 Hz
• RAM 12/16 GB (LPDDR5X), internal memory 512 GB/1 TB (UFS 4.0)
• No microSD support
• Support Nano-SIM (2 pcs.), e-SIM
• Networks 2G GSM, 3G WCDMA, 4G LTE, 5G
• GPS (L1+L5), Glonass (G1), BDS (B1I+B1c+B2a), Galileo (E1+E5a), QZSS (L1+L5)
• WiFi 7
• Bluetooth 5.3, A2DP, LE, aptX HD
• NFC
• USB 3.0 Type-C, USB OTG
• There is no 3.5mm audio output for headphones
• Rear cameras 48 MP + 64 MP (telephoto) + 48 MP (wide), video 4K@60 fps, gyro-EIS, HDR10+, Dolby Vision
• Front cameras 20 MP and 32 MP
• Proximity and lighting sensors, magnetic field, accelerometer, gyroscope
• Fingerprint scanner (side-mounted)
• Stereo speakers (4 pcs.)
• 4805 mAh battery, 67 W charging (PD)
• Dimensions 153x143x5.8mm (opened), 153x73x11.7mm (closed)
• Weight 239 or 245 g

The Oppo Find N3 smartphone comes in a square cardboard box that opens like a box.

The kit includes a charger (67 W), an interface cable and a protective case.

The most important distinguishing feature of the Oppo Find N3 in terms of appearance is its noticeably increased dimensions compared to its predecessor. The Find N2 was known for its diminutive size, making it stand out from other foldable smartphones on the market. However, the new Oppo flip phone is just as big, heavy, thick and bulky as the rest. In addition, it has a huge round washer with cameras at the back, which adds thickness to the body. Now the device definitely cannot be called miniature.

The Oppo Find N3 body is made of brushed aluminum with glass panels, and is also available in eco-leather. The screen is completely flat and protected by durable Ceramic Guard glass. The screen already has a factory protective film applied.

When folded, the Oppo Find N3 is not as compact as the previous model, nor is it as narrow as the Samsung Fold, which can be operated with one hand. Here the device is wide and not intended for one-handed use. When you try to operate it with one hand, it often slips out of your hand. It also unfolds with just two hands.

There is no gap between the halves; the screen is framed around the entire perimeter by a plastic protruding rim.

Opening the halves requires little effort, after which the hinge confidently holds them in different positions, maintaining stability. Approaching the extreme points, the closer begins to operate. In general, the opening mechanism works flawlessly. This allows, for example, to place a half-opened smartphone on a table and use the rear cameras to take pictures or conduct video conferences using the built-in selfie camera on the internal screen.

On one side of the smartphone there are convenient buttons that are easily accessible to your finger. The keys are large, protruding well and have a clear response. The fingerprint scanner is integrated into the lock button and works quickly and reliably. Nearby there is a separate three-position slider for switching sound modes (on/vibrate/off) — which is a rarity in the smartphone market.

When folded, the smartphone lies stably on a hard surface thanks to the large width of the protruding block on the back wall. However, when unfolded, the puck with cameras is located in one corner, which raises the device above the table. As a result, it starts to wobble a little when working with the screen.

The internal display also has a factory protective film that should not be removed. The fold is almost invisible, the screen does not have the notorious “wrinkles”.

The slide-out tray can accommodate two Nano-SIM cards. There is no room for a microSD memory card.

The complete case consists of two separate frame halves, which are attached to the body due to friction, without the use of Velcro. When assembled, this adds bulkiness, and there is no desire to increase the volume of an already rather large device, which can hardly be called pocket-sized.

At the bottom edge of the smartphone there are four speakers, microphones, a retractable memory card tray and a USB Type-C connector. However, there is no 3.5mm audio output for wired mini-jack headphones.

The Oppo Find N3 is not fully dust and water resistant, but it does have IPX4 light splash protection. In most cases, this is enough: in rainy weather the device will not fail, which is the main advantage.

The Oppo Find N3 smartphone is equipped with a flexible internal OLED display with a diagonal of 7.82 inches and a resolution of 2268x2440 pixels, providing a pixel density of 426 ppi. The width of the frame around the screen is about 4 mm on all sides. The screen supports a 120 Hz refresh rate, Dolby Vision mode and multi-touch up to 10 touches.

The external screen of the smartphone is OLED with a diagonal of 6.29 inches and a resolution of 1116 × 2484 pixels, providing a pixel density of 433 ppi. The screen is protected by flat protective glass. The screen refresh rate is 120 Hz, Dolby Vision mode and multi-touch up to 10 touches are supported.

The external screen of the Oppo Find N3 smartphone is made of plastic and has a diagonal of 6.29 inches with a resolution of 1116 × 2484 pixels and a pixel density of 433 ppi. The surface of this screen is slightly uneven, with a noticeable crease where it is folded, but this does not affect the image quality, especially when viewing the screen perpendicular to its surface. There is a protective film glued to this screen, which is not recommended to be removed.

The additional screen is made in the form of a glass plate with a smooth surface. Its anti-glare properties are slightly better than those of the main screen, and its surface has an oleophobic coating that improves protection against dirt.

The maximum brightness of the main screen in normal conditions is 580 cd/m², and the additional one is 550 cd/m², but can reach up to 970/700 cd/m² in bright light. Both screens have good readability during the day in the sun, and the minimum brightness allows you to use the device even in complete darkness. The auto-brightness function works adequately and allows the user to adjust the brightness to suit different lighting conditions.

At high and medium brightness, the modulation duty cycle is low, which eliminates visible flicker. When the brightness is greatly reduced, modulation appears at a high frequency (1.44 kHz), but no visible flicker occurs.

In the screen settings, you can enable a mode with an increased refresh rate of up to 120 Hz (for certain applications you can select 90 Hz):

In 120 Hz mode, the smoothness of scrolling lists and menus noticeably increases, while the nature of the modulation remains unchanged. It is worth noting that regardless of the selected mode, the refresh rate always decreases when the screen is not touched.

Both screens are equipped with a Super AMOLED matrix — an active matrix based on organic light-emitting diodes. To create a full-color image, subpixels of three colors are used: red ®, green (G) and blue (B). However, the number of red and blue subpixels is half as much, which corresponds to the RGBG scheme.

In the fragment above you can see 4 green subpixels, 2 red (4 halves) and 2 blue (1 whole and 4 quarters). By repeating these fragments, you can fill the entire screen without gaps or overlaps. Such matrices are usually called PenTile RGBG. The manufacturer determines the screen resolution by the number of green subpixels, while for the other two colors it will be lower. Despite some unevenness of contrast borders and other artifacts, high resolution minimizes their impact on image quality.

The screens have excellent viewing angles. White may take on a slight blue-green tint at high viewing angles, but black remains unsurpassed black at any angle. It is so saturated that the contrast parameter in this case becomes irrelevant. For comparison, photographs are presented in which identical images are displayed on the screens of the smartphone and the second device (Nexus 7). The brightness of the screens is initially set to approximately 200 cd/m², and the color balance on the camera is set to 6500 K.

Note the good uniformity of brightness and color tone of the white field.

And a test picture:

Saturation is fine, but color balance is noticeably different from the Nexus 7 screen. It's important to remember that photographs do not always accurately convey color quality and are used for illustrative purposes only. For example, the pronounced reddish tint of white and gray areas that is noticeable in photographs of smartphone screens is not visually noticeable when viewed directly, as confirmed by hardware tests performed by a spectrophotometer. This occurs because the spectral sensitivity of the camera sensor does not exactly match this characteristic of human vision.

The photo above was taken with the Natural profile, which is the default setting. There are three profiles available:

When you select the Pro profile, the color balance changes — the shades become warmer:

When the Vivid profile is selected, the colors on the smartphone screens are oversaturated (note the tomatoes, bananas, napkin and face shade), and the color balance is noticeably different from the balance of the Nexus 7 screen:

The brightness at an angle for all screens decreases noticeably, but in the case of a smartphone the drop in brightness is much less pronounced. As a result, with formally the same brightness, the screens of this smartphone visually look much brighter (compared to LCD screens), since you often have to look at the screen of a mobile device from at least a slight angle.

Switching the state of the matrix elements is almost instantaneous, but at the turn-on edge there may be a step width of approximately 17 ms (which corresponds to a screen refresh rate of approximately 60 Hz), or approximately 8 ms (120 Hz), or approximately 11 ms (90 Hz). For example, this is what the dependence of brightness on time looks like when moving from black to white (60 Hz and 120 Hz mode):

In some conditions, the presence of such a step can lead to (and does) trail trailing moving objects.

A gamma curve constructed using 32 points with equal intervals based on the numerical value of the shade of gray showed that there is no significant blockage either in the highlights or in the shadows. The index of the approximating power function is 2.25 for the main screen and 2.24 for the additional screen, which is close to the standard value of 2.2. In both cases, the real gamma curve deviates little from the power-law dependence:

Let us recall that in the case of OLED screens, the brightness of image fragments dynamically changes in accordance with the nature of the displayed image — it decreases slightly for generally light images. As a result, the resulting dependence of brightness on hue (gamma curve) most likely does not exactly correspond to the gamma curve of a static image, since the measurements were carried out with sequential display of shades of gray almost on the entire screen.

The color gamut in Vivid mode is wider than sRGB and almost equal to DCI-P3:

When selecting the Natural or Pro profile, the coverage is compressed to the sRGB boundaries:

In the case of the Bright profile, the spectra of the components are well separated, which allows for wide coverage:

In the case of the Natural or Pro profile with maximum coverage correction, the color components are mixed together to a significant extent:

When using wide-gamut screens without appropriate color correction, regular images created for sRGB devices may appear unnaturally saturated. Therefore, it is recommended to prefer the Pro profile when viewing movies, photos and other natural images. The Vivid profile is best used when viewing material with DCI-P3 coverage, which is most often found in digital cinema, but rarely in everyday life.

After selecting the Pro profile, the balance of shades on the gray scale becomes good, with a color temperature close to the standard 6500 K. In significant areas of the gray scale, this parameter remains virtually unchanged, which improves the visual perception of color balance. The deviation from the blackbody spectrum (ΔE) remains below 10 units, which is good for a consumer device, and the spread of this characteristic is also not very large.

In most cases, you can ignore the darkest areas of the gray scale, since color balance does not play an important role there, and the error in measuring color characteristics at low brightness is quite high.

Although this device has the ability to adjust the color balance using a cool to warm tint adjustment, this is usually not necessary if the Pro profile is selected.

There is also a Natural Color Mode feature that, when enabled, automatically adjusts the color balance to environmental conditions.

After activating this feature and running tests, we did not notice any significant correction in color balance when the color temperature of the light sources changed greatly. It is now common practice to calibrate display devices to a white point of 6500 K. However, correction for the color temperature of ambient light can be useful to achieve a better match between the image on the screen and what is seen on paper or other media where colors are formed by the reflection of incident light. Sveta.

In addition, in the settings you can reduce the intensity of the blue component.

In principle, bright light can disrupt the circadian rhythm, but this can be corrected by reducing the brightness to a comfortable level, rather than distorting the color balance by reducing the blue component.

This device supports DisplayPort Alt Mode for USB Type-C, which allows you to output image and sound to an external device via the USB port. When connected to a Full HD monitor, video is output in 1080p mode at 60 Hz frame rate. The operating mode is a simple copying of the active smartphone screen, while the image on the monitor is displayed inscribed to the nearest borders with black fields, without point-to-point mode.

Both screens have very high maximum brightness (970/700 cd/m²) and excellent anti-glare properties. Therefore, the device can be used outdoors even on a bright sunny day. In complete darkness, the brightness can be reduced to a comfortable value (up to 2 cd/m²). The mode with automatic brightness adjustment works adequately. The advantages of the screens include an effective oleophobic coating, no flicker, support for a high refresh rate (120 Hz), a color gamut close to sRGB when choosing the right profile, and good color balance.

In addition, OLED screens have true blacks (if nothing is reflected on the screen) and less drop in image brightness when viewed from an angle. The quality of the screens is very high.

The Oppo Find N3 smartphone is equipped with three full-fledged cameras on the rear (“outer”) side of the body: main, telephoto and wide-angle. All three cameras are equipped with autofocus, and only the wide-angle one does not have an optical stabilizer. The cameras, by the way, were improved with the participation of Hasselblad specialists.

• 48 MP, 1/1.43″, 1.12 µm, f/1.7, 24 mm, multi-directional PDAF, OIS (main)
• 64 MP, 1/2.0″, 0.7 µm, f/2.6, 70 mm, PDAF, OIS, 3× optical zoom (telephoto)
• 48 MP, 1/2.0″, 0.8 µm, f/2.2, 14 mm, 114˚, PDAF (wide angle)

The main camera uses pixel binning by default, creating images with a resolution of 12 megapixels. However, there is an option to manually switch to the full 48MP resolution, which is called «high resolution». There is a slight increase in detail in 48-megapixel photos, although very fine details may be slightly distorted due to the slight application of sharpening. Therefore, the legibility of, for example, small text will be questionable in both cases.

Reduced resolution photos are slightly brighter and more contrasty, creating a better sense of dimension.

The image quality is the highest: the pictures have high detail, clarity, contrast and volume. There is virtually no noise, artifacts or distortion. The dynamic range is wide, which allows you to successfully capture a scene without overexposure and loss of detail in both bright and dark areas, even in strong sunlight. The HDR mode copes well with backlit conditions. Color rendition is quite natural, which distinguishes these photographs from many other flagship photographs.

More examples of pictures from the main camera:

In night mode, the automatic mode slightly enhances color saturation, making pictures more attractive. At the same time, noise is carefully reduced, almost without affecting detail and clarity. Exposure remains within adequate limits.

The camera with a long lens also has two shooting modes — pixel binning and full resolution. The long lens has autofocus and, more importantly, a stabilizer to ensure clear, blur-free images. Detailing is at a high level.

The ultra-wide-angle camera has poor performance, and its images leave much to be desired, even at a reduced size. In addition to modest detail, they also do not accurately reproduce colors compared to the main camera, and also have noticeable blurring and distortion at the edges of the frame.

The smartphone has excellent capabilities for video shooting: smooth video without blinking, effective stabilization, high detail. Capable of recording at a maximum resolution of 4K at a frame rate of 60 fps using electronic stabilization based on the built-in gyroscope (gyro-EIS). HDR and Dolby Vision modes are supported. However, color rendering may appear unnatural with additional color processing. The recording sound quality is also high.

The smartphone is equipped with two front cameras: one is built into the internal display matrix (20 MP, f/2.2), and the other is located on the outside (32 MP, f/2.4). The external camera is mainly used for selfies, while the internal one is more often used for video calls. The quality of pictures taken with an external camera is at a high level, there are no complaints.

The Oppo Find N3 smartphone supports networks up to 5G and demonstrates stable operation in wireless networks in urban environments in the Moscow region. It reliably holds the connection and quickly restores it after a break. The device is also equipped with a wireless adapter that supports three bands Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 5.3 and NFC. There is e-SIM support.

The smartphone is equipped with a two-channel satellite navigation module compatible with GPS, Glonass, BDS, Galileo and QZSS. The first satellites are quickly detected during a cold start, and the positioning accuracy is not satisfactory.

The voice of the interlocutor in the speaker is clear, at maximum volume. The vibration is great and pleasant. All the necessary built-in sensors, including a gyroscope, are present.

The Oppo Find N3 smartphone runs on the Android 14 operating system with its own ColorOS 14 shell. This interface is well optimized and has a long history of development, having been supplemented over the years with many additional modes and functions. It is especially convenient to use multitasking mode with floating windows and split screen mode. The notification shade is presented as a single telescopic element, without being divided into two parts depending on where it is pulled. Full support for Google services and access to the Google Play Store.

The smartphone is equipped with several powerful stereo speakers installed at the end of each half. These four speakers produce very powerful and loud sound, making the device's audio system truly outstanding. Bluetooth 5.3 and all current profiles for wireless headphones, such as aptX, aptX HD and LDAC, are supported. However, the lack of an audio output for quality wired headphones is a slight disappointment.

The Oppo Find N3 smartphone is powered by the Qualcomm SM8550-AB Snapdragon 8 Gen2 processor. It may have 12 or 16 GB of RAM (LPDDR5X) and 512 GB or 1 TB of internal storage (UFS 4.0). There is no support for microSD memory cards, but it is possible to connect external devices via the USB Type-C port in USB OTG mode.

This powerful flagship platform is built on the 4nm process technology and achieves impressive results in the AnTuTu performance test, exceeding 1.25 million points. The graphics adapter supports the Vulkan API. The only criticism is the low results in browser tests, although in practice the performance of this smartphone is more than enough for any task. The interface runs smoothly, games run without lag, even Genshin Impact runs on high graphics settings.

All smartphone testing results were presented in a convenient table, which also included several other devices from different market segments. They have been tested against the latest versions of popular benchmarks to provide a clear indication of performance. However, due to limitations in the ability to present results from different versions of benchmarks in a single comparison, many other worthy and relevant models have been left out.

We test for performance degradation when heated using the Burnout Benchmark program, which allows you to load the CPU, GPU and NPU:

The Oppo Find N3 Pro smartphone is equipped with a 4805 mAh battery, which is slightly smaller than the current standard. In performance tests, the device demonstrated an average level of autonomy compared to conventional mobile devices. The tests we conducted included watching videos on both the internal and external display, and as expected, the smartphone lasted a little longer on the external display.

Testing was carried out at normal power consumption levels without using the power saving features, although these are also available on the device. The conditions included the minimum comfortable screen brightness (approximately 100 cd/m²). Tests included continuous reading in the Moon+ Reader app, watching HD videos over a home Wi-Fi network, and playing Injustice 2 with automatic graphics settings.

All data above represents the maximum possible values obtained under near-ideal conditions, including no SIM cards installed. Any changes in device use will likely reduce these results.

The Oppo Find N3 Pro smartphone can be fully charged from the included charger in 40 minutes. Wireless charging is not supported in this model.

From a technical point of view, the smartphone is almost flawless. It features Qualcomm's flagship platform, great OLED screens, and one of the best surround speakers available. The quality of photo and video recording is impressive. The only possible complaint is the increase in size, which led to the loss of some of the “individuality” characteristic of previous models in this series.