The Oppo Find N5 is the world’s slimmest foldable – but how does it compare to one of the most popular around, the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 6?
While Oppo’s foldable clearly has the edge when it comes to overall design, Samsung’s foldable has a lot going for it, from solid protection from the elements to Galaxy AI smarts and more – and that can make it hard to decide which is best for your needs.
Here’s how the Oppo Find N5 and Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 6 compare on paper.
Pricing and availability
Although the Oppo Find N5 was released ” globally,” Oppo has confirmed that it will only be available in Singapore and China, starting at SGD 2,499. This means it is not easily available in the UK, US, or EU, and your only real option is to import the phone from abroad.
The Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 6 is much easier to find, having launched worldwide in August 2024. It officially costs £1,799/$1,899, but in recent months, we’ve seen the price drop at retailers like Amazon.
The Oppo Find N5 is thinner and lighter
The Oppo Find N5 is an impressive feat of engineering. In fact, it offers the thinnest and lightest build of any book-style foldable to date. When folded, it’s an impressively slim 8.9mm thick and weighs just 229g, both of which are comfortably in regular smartphone territory.
The Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 6 did trim a few millimetres off its width compared to its predecessor, but at 12.1mm thick and 239g, it’s still a way off what you’ll find from Oppo’s flagship.
The Find N5 is also slightly squatter than the Z Fold 6. It has a 6.62-inch cover screen and foldable 8.12-inch screen, compared to Samsung’s slightly narrower 6.3-inch cover screen and 7.6-inch internal display.
The Find N5 also does a better job of negating the crease on the inner foldable screen, with less of a noticeable dip than Samsung’s alternative.
The Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 6 offers dust and water protection
The Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 6 led the foldable charge when it came to IP protection. Until the Z Fold 6, most foldables – both clamshell and book-style – offered water resistance but very little in the dust department.
The Z Fold 6 bucked this trend with an IP48 dust and water resistance rating, protecting it against submersion in up to 1.5m of water for up to 30 minutes and larger dust and dirt particles. It’s still not as robust as an iPhone or Pixel, but it’s a step in the right direction.
The Oppo Find N5, on the other hand, offers no official dust resistance.
However, it ups the ante in the water resistance department, being rated for IPX7, IPX8, and even IPX9. It’s the first foldable to offer the latter, which essentially means that the Find N5 should be protected against high-pressure jets of hot water, as well as being submerged and splashed.
The Oppo Find N5 has a more capable zoom camera
The Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 6 might offer the same combination of a 50MP main camera, 10MP 3x telephoto, and 12MP ultrawide as its predecessor, but it’s still comparable to the Oppo Find N5’s offering – in most respects, anyway.
The competing Oppo Find N5 features a similarly capable 50MP lens paired with a sensor of comparable size, along with OIS and PDAF autofocus. Although the 8MP ultrawide may lack the advantage in megapixel count, it possesses a slightly larger sensor that should balance performance with Samsung’s alternative.
The real difference is zoom performance. Oppo’s answer to the Z Fold 6’s 10MP 3x telephoto is a high-res 50MP 3x periscope lens. While both offer the same native 3x zoom, the Find N5’s periscope design and pixel-binning tech should allow for better-quality shots at higher zoom levels compared to Samsung’s fixed 3x alternative.
The Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 6 has better software
Samsung’s OneUI 6 might be running on Android 14, compared to the Oppo Find N5’s ColorOS 15 based on Android 15, but the former is set to get the OneUI 7 upgrade in the coming months. It’s in beta testing, as we speak!
That said, the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 6 offers a solid foldable software experience with tablet-like elements, such as a floating toolbar at the bottom of the screen, split-screen multitasking, support for Samsung DeX, and more.
Samsung also offers a suite of GenAI-powered tools under the Galaxy AI umbrella, which allow users to rewrite texts, transcribe recordings, generate images based on sketches, remove people from photos, and more.
The Find N5’s ColorOS 15 is a little tougher to recommend in Western markets. Not because it’s a terrible UI – far from it, we praised the software in the Oppo Find X8 Pro review. Rather, it’s because the Find N5’s flavour of ColorOS 15 isn’t designed for use in Western markets and, as such, doesn’t come with Google pre-installed.
You can install Google services on the foldable, but there are a bunch of Eastern-focused features and apps that you won’t be able to use in the West.
The Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 6 also has better long-term support, with Samsung committing to seven OS upgrades for the foldable. That said, the Find N5’s six OS upgrades are still among the best.
The Oppo Find N5 has a more powerful processor
The Oppo Find N5 packs Qualcomm’s latest mobile chipset, the Snapdragon 8 Elite, coupled with 12- or 16GB of RAM. That’s the follow-up to the custom Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chipset found in the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 6 and its accompanying 12GB RAM.
You might assume that, even with a single-generation jump in chipset that performance would still be comparable, but that’s not the case this year.
That’s mainly down to the Snapdragon 8 Elite’s CPU, which utilises the same Oriyon architecture as the laptop-level Snapdragon X Elite for massive year-on-year gains across the board. In terms of CPU and GPU grunt, you’re looking at around a 45% and 40% increase respectively, while the NPU is also 45% faster. It’s also 45% more efficient to boot.
This should translate to one of the most powerful foldables around right now. While we’ve not benchmarked the Find N5 just yet, we’ve seen similar benchmark-beating performance from Snapdragon 8 Elite-equipped phones like the OnePlus 13 and Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra.
Early Thoughts
The Oppo Find N5 looks like a tempting alternative to the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 6. It has the thinnest, lightest design of any book-style foldable right now while not compromising on the core foldable experience. It still has sizeable displays, top-end power, capable cameras and solid battery life.
Instead, the catch is availability; with no official launch in the UK, US or Europe, the Find N5 has to be imported from Singapore or China. That also means that the Find N5’s flavour of ColorOS 15 lacks Google services by default and sports Eastern-focused features and apps.
The Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 6’s wide availability, great software and robust design make it a tempting alternative, even if it’s not quite as capable as the Find N5 on paper.
We’ll leave our final verdict until we’ve spent more time with the Oppo Find N5, so head back soon. Take a look at our list of the best foldable phones for more inspiration in the meantime.
