Oppo has just announced that its Find N2 Flip will be coming to the UK, having already revealed the device in China back in December 2022. And that's a pretty big deal, as the Find N2 Flip brings one massive (quite literally) cover screen feature compared to its most obvious Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 4 competitor.
In the battle for best folding phone, Oppo is really onto something here: the Find N2 Flip's front screen, visible when in its sandwich-like folded position, measures a massive 3.26-inches on its diagonal. The Galaxy Z Flip 4's? That's just 1.9-inches by comparison.
I think that gives the Oppo Find N2 Flip a real sense of purpose in this hotly contested market. There aren't many viable competitors at present, really, as beyond Samsung it's only the Motorola Razr (2022 edition) that's been making in-waves (and, arguably, from a nostalgia point of view it's most recognisable) thanks to the latter device's reasonably-sized 2.7-inch front display.
However, having a larger cover screen is one thing, making sure it's always useful is another. A colleague has already penned an Oppo needs to learn from the Razr feature, but having used the Find N2 Flip for a brief period, I find unlocking it can be a problem for ease of access.
The problem lies when using the fingerprint scanner with the phone folded: it fails in this folded position frequently in my experience, which forces a 30-second time-out, by which point you'll end up wanting to just unfold the phone to unlock. This needs some software tweaking to make the unlocking process more viable in my view (I even added 'upside down' fingerprint edges to try and work around it, but no luck).
In principle, though, having a large cover screen gives more purpose to a flip phone's form factor, as you can leave it in the sandwich position and get better use out of it without the need to unfold. So just what can the Find N2 Flip do from its cover screen?
There are a bunch of cover screen features: swipe down for settings; swipe up for notifications; you can reply to messages; and widgets are available, including selfie camera, weather, calendar, recorder, headphones pairing, and timer. Oh, and you can even have 'virtual pet' wallpapers to interact with, which is quirky the say the least.
What I think is really interresting about the Find N2 Flip, however, is its asking price. At £849, that undercuts the Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 4's initial launch price by a full £150. Sure, time plays a factor and you can buy the Samsung at this very same price right now, if you can cope with that smaller cover screen. I think this competitive pricing gives Oppo some serious potential in this flip-phone market.
