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The best new tech heading your way
1 OPPO FIND N
● £TBC, oppo.com
This is the device that will elevate Oppo through the smartphone ranks. The Find N is a true flagship, a phone that doesn’t only match the potential of its ultra-premium competitor but, for what we’d have to assume was a very large proportion of potential buyers, betters it. It’s a phone that changes what we know about foldables, and changes what we should expect in the future. Can you tell we’re rather excited about it?
The fact is that this is a very clever handset indeed. Oppo has solved two of the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold’s biggest problems through clever industrial design. One, the strangely elongated body of the Z Fold gets chopped down, making the closed Find N look more like a chubby candybar handset, and giving its inner screen a wider, more reachable aspect ratio. Two, the fold aspect of the Galaxy Z Fold, which left a definite kink along the centre of the inner screen, appears to have been vastly reduced by a clever hinge design that reduces the bend radius of the Find N’s glass.
At press time Oppo is pitching this device only at its native Chinese market, but (while no formal announcement has yet been made) all the signs point to a western release being pretty much a certainty. Oppo may not even be done innovating, given that this is the manifestation of its recent Peacock prototype; another foldable is apparently in the works, and we saw its rollable Oppo X prototype in early 2021. Could that be next? We can’t wait to find out.
PACKAGE DEAL The Find N is not all looks and no trousers. There’s a flagship-standard Snapdragon 888 on processing duties backed by the option of 256GB storage with 8GB RAM or 512GB storage and 12GB RAM. Sturdy stuff.