This year's foldable phone king could be with us very soon – months before Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 7

Oppo is stepping up the charm offensive ahead of the launch of the Oppo Find N5, which the company is expected to launch in China in February. The important thing about this phone is that it’s likely to be foundation device for the OnePlus Open 2, which we have high hopes for.

The original OnePlus Open was one of the best folding phones, so this is a significant device.

We previously shared that the Oppo Find N5 could be the slimmest folding phone around and now the brand is back sharing some official images of the device – alongside the iPhone 16 Pro. Chinese brands don’t shy away from direct comparisons with rival devices and here it’s clear that the Find N5 is significantly slimmer than the iPhone.

The details were shared by Zhou Yibao, product manager for Oppo’s Find devices, on Weibo (via Notebookcheck.net). Zhou says in the post that the limit to the thinness comes from the USB-C port – quite a bold statement.

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Of course, the thing to consider here is that a folding phone has two halves to pack in its core tech, while a candybar phone like the iPhone has to pack it into a narrower body. That makes this comparison a little unusual, but it’s easy to get a sense of how thin the phone is. The iPhone 16 Pro is 8.25mm thick.

There’s long been talk of an iPhone 17 with a much slimmer build, which some people are calling the iPhone 17 Air. That device is rumoured to have a thinner build more like the iPad Pro, which is only 5.3mm thick, giving a sense of the sort of thickness that we might be racing towards.

Oppo Find N5 will be waterproof

That’s not the only news that has surfaced about Oppo’s folding phone. In a separate video, we see the Chinese firm teasing the Find N5 in water. While Oppo hasn’t cracked protection against dust, we learn that the Find N5 will be IPX7, IPX8 and IPX9 certified.

That means it’s passed a range of tests around water protection, meaning it can withstand rain, can be dunked underwater and will withstand water jets too. While this makes for a fun video, it’s not the only foldable with water protection, as Motorola boasts an IPX8 rating for the Razr 50 Ultra and the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 6 has an IP48 rating – so the only real advancement from Oppo is the protection against water jets.

Elsewhere, it’s expected that the Oppo Find N5 will use the Snapdragon 8 Elite 7-core version, which was confirmed at launch, but has rarely been discussed till now, while it is also expected to run Android 15.

Whether the Oppo Find N5 will come to the UK, Europe or the US is currently unknown, but the OnePlus Open 2 that follows it is likely to target these regions specifically. With Samsung not expected to launch the Galaxy Z Fold 7 until summer 2025, it could be that there’s a significant rival available well before Samsung’s device.