We were expecting to see Oppo’s foldable phone thisMobile World Congress (MWC), but it isn’t at the show. Instead,pictures have emergedon Chinese social network Weibo, supposedly from the company itself.
The phone is clearly a prototype and has an OLED wraparound display on the outside rather than folding internally, while one side of the screen has a thicker bezel (that looks pretty chunky) for cameras and so on.
Oppo hasn’t brought the devices we thought it would to this MWC - we thought that not only would we get the foldable, but we’d also get Oppo’s first 5G phone which we’veonly seen in a concealed form. The company didshow off its admittedly-impressive 10x optical zoomand said it would be using Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 855 and the X50 5G modem in itsfirst 5G device.
News broke in Novemberthat Oppo was intending to bring a folding device to the show. Oppo product manager Chuck Wang toldAndroidWorldat the time: “We know Samsung and Sony are working on a foldable phone, you can also expect more news from Oppo on that topic, maybe at MWC."
Although it hasn’t been shown at MWC and there’s a definite reality check that suggests Oppo is nowhere near shipping this phone - Oppo vice president Brian Shen suggests that Oppo won’t ship the device unless there’s a lot of demand. Could this phone be theFind Z, or is that the name of Oppo’s next standard flagship?
That’s a shame, because Samsung and Huawei are further down the road than other companies - and us - thought. We were expecting to see devices that might ship later this year, but both Samsung and Huawei are releasing their foldables very soon.
