This week, Oppo announced its most ambitious phone in years: the Oppo Find N, a foldable phone that attempts to eliminate the main problems affecting other phones of its kind.
It’s shockingly less expensive than the competition. It has the least obvious hinge fold we’ve seen in a foldable phone to date. The Oppo Find N is also easier to use with one hand than its other foldable bars Samsung Galaxy Flip series.
This is progress. However, at first glance, none of that matters. Oppo Find N will launch only in China, the home country of Oppo. We are unlikely to see the phone widely released in the UK, although the brand is increasingly recognized in the country. And a US launch doesn’t seem to be out of the question as Oppo is barely present there. At the same event, Oppo also announced its version of Google Glass, Air Glass, again not intended for release outside of China.
So if we can’t get our hands on the Oppo Find N, why are we writing about it?
Big BBK Shape Shadow
Oppo is not a completely independent entity. It’s part of one of the lesser-recognized consumer tech giants – at least in the West. According to Counterpoint Research, Oppo, a brand of BBK Electronics, has taken advantage of Huawei’s decline to gain more than 44% share of the smartphone market in China.
This makes Apple, Xiaomi and Samsung superior. And BBK Electronics is making moves to change its strategy in the West, taking advantage of “another difference” in its product line, OnePlus. It may not be long before we see some of the Find N tech on OnePlus phones.
The top phone brands of BBK Electronics are Oppo, Vivo, Realme, OnePlus and IQOO. OnePlus is the only brand that is widely distributed in the US, and the only one that is said to be not explicitly recognized as a Chinese company. And its long-term success is arguably the result of an out-of-hand experiment.
OnePlus was founded in late 2013. Its co-founders are 24-year-old Carl Pei and 38-year-old Pete Lau. The two worked together at Oppo.
It’s not uncommon to see founders of tech startups in their twenties. But OnePlus wasn’t really a startup, more like a startup at the time. It’s a project funded by a tech giant — not something you’d expect to fall into the hands of someone who dropped out of business school a few years ago, as Pei actually did.
Imagine Samsung launching a brand new phone today, launched exclusively via TikTok by a young, fresh-faced co-founder. That’s OnePlus.
OnePlus went from inception to phone launch in just four months. This would probably not have been possible without using BBK Electronics’ existing supply chains and manufacturing partners.
The results were almost as good as expected. OnePlus phones from OnePlus have encountered a supply-demand situation that’s no different than today’s Xbox Series X and PS5, albeit on a much smaller scale. Looking back, the OnePlus One should have been a disaster. But it’s not. It was a really good phone and almost certainly the best value “premium” phone in the world at the time.
