Foldables are a well-established category by now, and we’ve reached the point where great foldables are great phones, period.
Take the excellent Oppo Find N5 as the perfect example. It can easily go toe-to-toe with just about any standard flagship out there in terms of performance, battery life, and camera quality, with the massive added bonus of being a foldable phone hiding away a massive screen on the inside.
The reason for that is the unacceptable Color OS skin that sours the experience.
Don’t you just hate it when good hardware gets paired with sub-par software?
Time and time again, different phones have proven one thing to me: you usually pick a phone from the likes of Oppo, Xiaomi, or Vivo for the hardware and the value, not the software. The latter is often the weakest part of the equation and is often sewn with white thread in many areas. Lacking essential features but overdelivering in terms of personalization and customization in order to appear half-decent is often the case with most custom Android skins originating from China.
Now don’t get me wrong, the Oppo Find N5 is one awesome phone as detailed in our review, objectively outclassing just about any other foldable phone in terms of hardware. It’s just that the software doesn’t fully live up to the expectations. There’s nothing beckoning you to use this interface, you simply learn to live with it and eventually become accustomed to its peculiar oddities. This isn’t how things should be.
For example, you’d think that a top-notch foldable that costs nearly $2,000 and comes with all the hardware bells and whistles you can think of save for a built-in stylus would let you change the icon layout of your home screen, right?
Think again! A 6X4 grid per screen is all you get, an oversight on Oppo’s part that brings the Oppo Find N5 down to basic iPhone levels of customization, which isn’t a compliment here. Weirdly, the ability to change the grid exists on standard Oppo phones with Color OS 15, so the lack of it here seems deliberate.
You’d also assume that you will at least get consistent notification icons, right? Nope, it’s only the stock apps that show colored icons in the status bar, while third-party are displayed as white ones. This creates a jarring disparity in the interface.
An unappealing mess” 
Color OS or iOS?
Another pet peeve of mine is originality. Not just Oppo, but many other manufacturers to this day are guilty of copying iOS, but somehow it never feels just as good. Oppo here has gone out of its way to emulate the iOS Control Center to the T, with obviously similar volume and brightness sliders, even the flashlight has an identical design here.
I’m not telling which one’s which
Other features copied straight from iOS is Apple’s Live Photo functionality, which I absolutely adore. Oppo has developed a similar feature in its Color OS software, which functions pretty much identical, and that’s fine. But of all possible design choices, did Oppo really have to go with a nearly 1:1 copy of Apple’s original Live Photo interface. I get that the company is trying to sway away iOS users, but does it really have to lose every bit of originality in the pursuit of doing so?
You will feel right at home on the Oppo if you love Live Photos as much as I do
An acquired taste at the end of the day
That said, it’s not all bad about the Color OS 15 interface here. There are some very nice exclusive features that I haven’t seen elsewhere.
For example, did you know that with the switch of a toggle, Color OS will hide away your notifications if its front camera detects another person looking at your phone and not you? That’s a cool and mighty useful privacy feature right here.
Personalization and customization are strong here, but not as deep as on other custom Android skins like Vivo’s Funtouch OS or Xiaomi’s HyperOS. In direct comparison between the three, I’d put the Color OS in the last place.
Eventually, I guess one would get accustomed to the interface of the Oppo Find N5, but it will probably involve some huffing and puffing in the process.
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