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I used the Oppo Find N5, here’s why it’s replacing my Galaxy Z Fold 6

Table of Contents Table of Contents Barely thicker than a regular phone when folded Unfolding a fantastic and large display No compromises on battery and charging Outstanding hardware with few compromises Is the Find N5 the final boss of folding phones?

After weeks of drip-teasing everyone about its new folding phone, Oppo has finally unveiled the Oppo Find N5. It’s the world’s thinnest foldable, and Oppo has addressed many of the constructive criticisms it faced with the Find N3. The result is a phone that demonstrates that folding phones no longer need to compromise, at least on paper.

The Oppo Find N5 also addresses many of the concerns about the folding phone category as a whole. When using the Galaxy Z Fold 6 or Pixel 9 Pro Fold in public, I’ll often get asked questions like is it durable enough? Can you see the crease? What’s the battery life? What about the cameras?

The Oppo Find N5 addresses most of these, but still leaves some room for improvement in future folding phones. It goes further than any previous folding phone to show that the maturing of technology means folding phones can be as thin and light as a regular phone, with the addition of a secondary display.

Here are our first impressions of Oppo’s new folding phone, which should have launched as the OnePlus Open 2 in the US.

Barely thicker than a regular phone when folded.

Measuring just [website] thick when unfolded, the Oppo Find N5 is extremely thin. Even more impressive is that it measures [website] thick when folded, making it barely thicker than a regular smartphone despite the large secondary display. It’s so thin that Oppo had to customize the USB-C port; there’s just a hair’s breadth of metal on the outer edge of the port.

Let’s put those numbers into context: it weighs just two grams more than the iPhone 16 Pro Max and is under a millimeter thicker than the Galaxy S25 Ultra (and Apple’s big phone). It is 3mm thinner and 10 grams lighter than the Galaxy Z Fold 6. It’s also thinner and lighter than the Galaxy Z Fold Special Edition, which Samsung launched last year as an upgrade to the Galaxy Z Fold 6. Unfolded, it is almost a millimeter thinner than the Pixel 9 Pro Fold, but also weighs almost 30 grams less.

What about the previous contender for the world’s thinnest folding phone? I love using the Honor Magic V3, but while the Oppo Find N5 is virtually identical in weight, it shaves [website] off the thickness. Honor already broke ground on being thin and light, but the Find N5 takes it a step further.

If you’ve always wanted a folding iPad Mini, look no further: the Find N5 has a bigger display when unfolded, but is thinner and lighter than Apple’s smallest tablet. It’s the closest we’ve come to the final form factor for folding phones, and the business has also reduced the crease significantly. Yes, there’s barely a crease if the light catches it wrong, but it’s still the least-creased folding phone that I’ve used and across ten attempts, I couldn’t get the crease to show up in a photo.

Unfolded, the Find N5 has an [website] OLED display with Dolby Vision, HDR10+ and HDR Vivid support, a dynamic refresh rate of 1-120Hz, and 2,100 nits peak brightness. Folded, the display measures [website] inches with the same display functions, higher peak brightness, Dolby Vision, and Ultra HDR Image support.

Here’s how the display sizes compare to the competition:

Phone Cover Display Main Display Oppo Find N5 [website] LTPO OLED.

2450 nits peak brightness [website], Foldable LTPO OLED.

2100 nits peak brightness Galaxy Z Fold 6 [website], Dynamic LTPO AMOLED.

1-120Hz, 2600 nits peak [website], Foldable LTPO AMOLED.

1-120Hz, HDR10+, 2600 nits peak Pixel 9 Pro Fold [website] OLED, 1-120Hz.

HDR, 2700 nits peak [website] Foldable LTPO OLED.

1-120Hz, HDR10+, 2700 nits peak Honor Magic V3 [website] LTPO OLED.

5000 nits peak brightness [website] Foldable LTPO OLED.

Dolby Vision, 1800 nits peak OnePlus Open [website] LTPO3 OLED.

1-120Hz, 2800 nits peak [website] Foldable LTPO3 OLED.

To put a bow on the display, there’s also stylus support. Unlike the Galaxy Z Fold 6, there’s support for the Pen on both displays, making the Find N5 the first foldable to support a stylus on both displays.

What about the battery life and charging? Surely a folding phone this thin would result in a smaller battery or slower charging? The answer is no: at 5,600 mAh, the Find N5 uses a bigger battery than any mainstream folding phone. For context, the Galaxy Z Fold 6 has a 4,400 mAh battery, the Pixel 9 Pro Fold is slightly bigger at 4,650 mAh, and the OnePlus Open has a 4,805 mAh battery.

This is made possible thanks to the second-generation Silicon Carbon battery, which we also saw deliver outstanding results in the OnePlus 13 and Oppo Find X8 Pro. Oppo and Honor remain the two companies to widely adopt this next-generation battery technology, and thanks to higher density potential, it means that batteries can be thinner than their Lithium-Ion predecessors.

Like other Oppo and OnePlus phones, there’s also superfast charging with the Find N5 coming equipped with 80W wired charging that can charge the battery to full in about 50 minutes. There’s also 50W wireless charging if you buy the additional magnetic charging case, although there’s no official support for Qi2 charging.

Outstanding hardware with few compromises.

You may be wondering where the compromises are, and it would be natural to think that durability could be one of these, but this would be wrong. The Find N5 is the first folding phone to support IPX9 — alongside IPX6 and IPX8 — which means it will withstand high-pressure jets. Or, as we saw with the OnePlus 13, you could probably run it through a dishwasher and it would be fine. However, there’s no rating for dust resistance, so it’s unclear whether it would survive a sandstorm; I guess that it will, but Oppo chose not to pay to certify it for this.

So where are the compromises? There are two that stand out, and they vary in importance. First, the processor: the Find N5 is powered by the flagship Snapdragon 8 Elite, but uses the new 7-core model instead of the 8-core version used by most flagships. This shouldn’t make a huge difference overall in performance, but it will be more efficient and less power-hungry so should lead to improved overall battery life.

The main compromise is likely to be in the camera, which has impressive specs but doesn’t quite hit the heights of recent OnePlus and Oppo phones. It still attributes a triple-camera setup with a 50MP main camera paired with a 50MP periscope telephoto lens that offers 3x optical zoom, and an 8MP ultrawide camera. The latter is my biggest concern; the Find N5 was bound to feature a compromise somewhere, and the ultrawide camera may prove to be the lesser of the evils, but it’s worth noting that the slightly thicker Magic V3 did manage to include a 40MP ultrawide camera.

Is the Find N5 the final boss of folding phones?

I’ve been waiting for the folding phone that felt like it wasn’t a compromise compared to a regular smartphone, and the Oppo Find N5 is the closest we’ve come to this eutopia. On paper, it offers the most rounded experience of any folding phone to date, and my first impressions back up this claim, although it’ll remain to be seen how it performs over the coming days.

I had also hoped that OnePlus would release it as the Open 2, mainly because it would force Samsung and Google — the former particularly — into action and kickstart a golden race toward the perfect folding phone. As it turns out, not releasing it in the US means it may not have the same effect, although these phones will still compete head-to-head in many other markets.

While the Pixel 9 Pro Fold is still fairly competitive, the Galaxy Z Fold 6 would likely lose by every metric, not least its size and weight. My sister was in the recent past considering the Galaxy Z Fold 6 and after using it briefly, she decided against it. She summarized it best: “I played with the Samsung fold and it’s quite heavy, no?”.

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MNC and Grwth merge to create a one-stop shop for UK challenger brands

UK media agency MNC has acquired Grwth, a pioneering consultancy and venture fund in the consumer brand space.

The multi-million-pound deal will create a dynamic one-stop shop for challenger brands that is built around proprietary market intelligence. The combined business will retain the MNC name.

MNC has built various challenger brands, including Moonpig, [website], Wayfair, Trivago and Oak Furniture Land.

The combined group has a trading history of £50 million+ in annual billings and intends to actively deploy capital into scaleup brands through their venture fund.

The deal will combine MNC’s proven track record among challenger brands with Grwth’s game-changing ‘operator first’ model. This will create a new paradigm that fuses media, advisory and venture funding into a differentiated proposition that meets clients’ real-world growth challenges.

, Integrating Grwth allows the business to merge 30 years of traditional media expertise with cutting-edge digital capabilities.

“Grwth not only brings deep brand-side experience to the team but a business based on rich data-powered insights.”.

Grwth co-founders Jake Higgins and Joe Benn join MNC as partners. Luke Bristow will lead the newly merged enterprise as CEO, while founder Andrew McCutcheon will continue as chairman. MNC veteran Daniel Fisk remains a director and board member.

MNC will be structured around a three-prong offering:

MNC Media: A full-funnel and channel-agnostic media agency built for challenger brands.

MNC Ventures: An investment fund focused on unearthing and funding Seed and Series A stage consumer businesses. The first portfolio investment was made in late 2024 with more announcements to follow this year.

MNC Club: an advisory service that matches brands with the best-suited creative and technical agency partners across the marketing spectrum. MNC Club has already enabled over 300+ challenger brands to find the right partner.

“Our integrated approach across Media, Ventures and Club gives us unique market intelligence — when innovative marketing strategies or tactics emerge in UK consumer brands, it is immediately on our radar."

MNC and Grwth are already working with the next wave of challenger brands, including Beauty Pie, Wealthify, TALA clothing and coffee brand GRIND.

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OpenInfer raises $8M for AI inference at the edge

OpenInfer has raised $8 million in funding to redefine AI inference for edge applications.

It’s the brain child of Behnam Bastani and Reza Nourai, who spent nearly a decade of building and scaling AI systems together at Meta’s Reality Labs and Roblox.

Through their work at the forefront of AI and system design, Bastani and Nourai witnessed firsthand how deep system architecture enables continuous, large-scale AI inference. However, today’s AI inference remains locked behind cloud APIs and hosted systems—a barrier for low-latency, private, and cost-efficient edge applications. OpenInfer changes that. It wants to agnostic to the types of devices at the edge, Bastani expressed in an interview with GamesBeat.

By enabling the seamless execution of large AI models directly on devices—from SoCs to the cloud—OpenInfer removes these barriers, enabling inference of AI models without compromising performance.

The implication? Imagine a world where your phone anticipates your needs in real time — translating languages instantly, enhancing photos with studio-quality precision, or powering a voice assistant that truly understands you. With AI inference running directly on your device, individuals can expect faster performance, greater privacy, and uninterrupted functionality no matter where they are. This shift eliminates lag and brings intelligent, high-speed computing to the palm of your hand.

Building the OpenInfer Engine: AI Agent Inference Engine.

Since founding the firm six months ago, Bastani and Nourai have assembled a team of.

seven, including former colleagues from their time at Meta. While at Meta, they had built Oculus.

Link together, showcasing their expertise in low-latency, high-performance system design.

Bastani previously served as Director of Architecture at Meta’s Reality Labs and led teams at.

Google focused on mobile rendering, VR, and display systems. Most in the recent past, he was Senior.

Director of Engineering for Engine AI at Roblox. Nourai has held senior engineering roles in.

graphics and gaming at industry leaders including Roblox, Meta, Magic Leap, and Microsoft.

OpenInfer is building the OpenInfer Engine, what they call an “AI agent inference engine”.

designed for unmatched performance and seamless integration.

To accomplish the first goal of unmatched performance, the first release of the OpenInfer.

Engine delivers 2-3x faster inference compared to [website] and Ollama for distilled DeepSeek.

models. This boost comes from targeted optimizations, including streamlined handling of.

quantized values, improved memory access through enhanced caching, and model-specific.

tuning—all without requiring modifications to the models.

To accomplish the second goal of seamless integration with effortless deployment, the.

OpenInfer Engine is designed as a drop-in replacement, allowing clients to switch endpoints.

simply by updating a URL. Existing agents and frameworks continue to function seamlessly,.

“OpenInfer’s advancements mark a major leap for AI developers. By significantly boosting.

inference speeds, Behnam and his team are making real-time AI applications more responsive,.

accelerating development cycles, and enabling powerful models to run efficiently on edge.

devices. This opens new possibilities for on-device intelligence and expands what’s possible in.

AI-driven innovation,” presented Ernestine Fu Mak, Managing Partner at Brave Capital and an.

OpenInfer is pioneering hardware-specific optimizations to drive high-performance AI inference.

on large models—outperforming industry leaders on edge devices. By designing inference from.

the ground up, they are unlocking higher throughput, lower memory usage, and seamless.

Future roadmap: Seamless AI inference across all devices.

OpenInfer’s launch is well-timed, especially in light of recent DeepSeek news. As AI adoption.

accelerates, inference has overtaken training as the primary driver of compute demand. While.

innovations like DeepSeek reduce computational requirements for both training and inference,.

edge-based applications still struggle with performance and efficiency due to limited processing.

power. Running large AI models on consumer devices demands new inference methods that.

enable low-latency, high-throughput performance without relying on cloud infrastructure,.

creating significant opportunities for companies optimizing AI for local hardware.

“Without OpenInfer, AI inference on edge devices is inefficient due to the absence of a clear.

hardware abstraction layer. This challenge makes deploying large models on.

compute-constrained platforms incredibly difficult, pushing AI workloads back to the.

cloud—where they become costly, slow, and dependent on network conditions. OpenInfer.

revolutionizes inference on the edge,” stated Gokul Rajaram, an investor in OpenInfer. Rajaram is.

an angel investor and currently a board member of Coinbase and Pinterest.

In particular, OpenInfer is uniquely positioned to help silicon and hardware vendors enhance AI.

inference performance on devices. Enterprises needing on-device AI for privacy, cost, or.

reliability can leverage OpenInfer, with key applications in robotics, defense, agentic AI, and.

In mobile gaming, OpenInfer’s technology enables ultra-responsive gameplay with real-time.

adaptive AI. Enabling on-system inference allows for reduced latency and smarter in-game.

dynamics. Players will enjoy smoother graphics, AI-powered personalized challenges, and a.

more immersive experience evolving with every move.

“At OpenInfer, our vision is to seamlessly integrate AI into every surface,” noted Bastani. “We aim to establish OpenInfer as the default inference engine across all devices—powering AI in self-driving cars, laptops, mobile devices, robots, and more.”.

OpenInfer has raised an $8 million seed round for its first round of financing. Investors include.

Brave Capital, Cota Capital, Essence VC, Operator Stack, StemAI, Oculus VR’s Co-founder and former CEO Brendan Iribe, Google Deepmind’s Chief Scientist Jeff Dean, Microsoft Experiences and Devices’ Chief Product Officer Aparna Chennapragada, angel investor Gokul Rajaram, and others.

“The current AI ecosystem is dominated by a few centralized players who control access to.

inference through cloud APIs and hosted services. At OpenInfer, we are changing that,” revealed.

Bastani. “Our name reflects our mission: we are ‘opening’ access to AI inference—giving.

everyone the ability to run powerful AI models locally, without being locked into expensive cloud.

services. We believe in a future where AI is accessible, decentralized, and truly in the hands of.

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