It's all in the glass, glass, baby

The state of play when it comes to foldable phones has only just hit primetime after years of teething pains that have hogged the spotlight. But the global field of competitors remains narrow with Motorola claiming the first strike only to be overtaken and lapped by Samsung. In China, Huawei took the lead with an answer only coming from Xiaomi a whole 2 years later. Now, Oppo is finally in the arena with a little something called the Find N.

Oppo — part of BBK Electronics which also owns the OnePlus and Vivo brands among others — laid out some R&D lore about the Find N a few days ago, including the six stages of prototyping its engineers went through.

Oppo is touting its investment in design as it seeks to avoid Samsung's teething issues with the foldable form factor. Its 12-layer formula for its display cover, which includes a substrate or some substrates of 0.03mm-thick glass, is meant to last through 200,000 fold cycles, withstand temperatures as low as -20°C, and produces a crease profile 80% smaller than in a competing device (let's be real, this is about the Galaxy Z Fold3) according to analysis from TÜV Rheinland. From these talking points, the imperative for the Find N is to not only outlast, but outclass on the glass component — after all, what you see on a phone is priority number one.

The company has also revealed that its Flexion hinge, made of 136 parts with a manufacturing tolerance of less than 0.01mm, costs three times as much to make. All this engineering should enable the Find N to have a larger range of usability at folded angles in FlexForm Mode than the Fold3 in Flex Mode — 50° to 120° versus 75° to 115°.

Oppo is also looking to outdo Samsung on the software side as well. To trigger split-screen mode, the Find N using a two-finger swipe gesture instead of the Fold3's sidebar controls — this conflicts with Android 12's two-finger swipe to activate one-handed mode, but we'll see how that gets handled as the phone launches with Android 11 out of the box. The transition between using the exterior display to the interior one (and vice versa) is also more immediate and, thus, not as clumsy-looking.

And while we're talking about the panels, both interior and exterior AMOLED screens are rated to achieve up to 1,000 nits of peak brightness with super-fine calibration of 10,240 levels.

There are plenty of trade-offs between the Find N and Fold3, but certain aspects such as the lower memory configuration and the slightly smaller footprint may open the folding phablet up to lower price points and more buyers.

Oppo's new phone will only be available in China starting December 23. The base memory configuration will cost 7,699 yuan ($1,209) and the advanced spec will go for 8,999 yuan ($1,413). If reception is positive, we may see same-gen or next-gen designs coming out of the BBK brands and reaching over to western markets.

Jules joined the Android Police team in 2019. Before that, he was at Pocketnow. He loves public transportation, podcasts, and people in general. He also likes to take views from the bigger picture in technology from how people are attracted to it to how it's utilized across every other industry.