OnePlus Open vs Galaxy Z Fold 5: An old rivalry reborn through foldable phones?

OnePlus has just announced its first foldable phone. It's called the OnePlus Open and it appears to be a rebranded Oppo Find N3. But if the Oppo Find N3 will not hit the shelves outside of China, the OnePlus Open will go on sale globally after its official announcement in India today. Is it any good? Has Samsung's Galaxy Z Fold series finally met its match? How does the OnePlus Open compare to the Galaxy Z Fold 5? Let's start with a closer look at the specifications.

The OnePlus Open has a 7.82-inch foldable AMOLED LTPO 3.0 display with a resolution of 2440 x 2268 and a refresh rate of 1-120Hz. Unlike other foldable phones not made by Samsung, this one does have a layer of protective Ultra Thin Glass for the foldable panel.

The Open's cover screen has a 6.31-inch diagonal, a resolution of 2484 x 1116, and a refresh rate of 10-120Hz. It, too, is based on AMOLED technology and has a LTPO 3.0 backplane. It also offers extra protection thanks to Ceramic Guard technology, which OnePlus claims to be 20% more robust than Gorilla Glass Victus.

The company also claims that both the primary and secondary displays can achieve 1400 nits of brightness in HBM (High Brightness Mode) and 2800 nits of peak brightness, but hasn't explained if it measured peak luminosity on a 1% surface area of the display or higher.

OnePlus' first foldable is equipped with two selfie cameras — one for each display — and three rear-facing sensors. The main triple-camera setup consists of a 48MP “Pixel Stacked” Sony LYT-T808 sensor, which OnePlus claims to be on par with the Galaxy S23 Ultra's 200MP ISOCELL unit, an OmniVision 64MP telephoto shooter with 3x optical zoom, and a Sony IMX581 48MP ultra-wide camera.

The primary selfie camera has a 20MP resolution, and the secondary unit clocks in at 32MP. Both have fixed focus.

More details after the Galaxy Z Fold 5 review video

Samsung may have found the rival it needed

As far as internal hardware is concerned, the OnePlus Open is powered by the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 chip and 16GB of RAM. It has 512GB of UFS 4.0 storage.

The internal hardware relies on a dual-cell battery consisting of a 3,295mAh primary unit and a secondary 1,510mAh battery for a total of 4,805mAh. The combo can benefit from 67W SUPERVOOC charging.

Everything is wrapped in a shell that OnePlus claims to contain proprietary metal allows that are 4-times more resilient than surgical-grade stainless steel. But the phone is IPX4-rated, which means it's mildly water-repellent. The Galaxy Z Fold 5 has an IPX8 rating, which essentially makes it water-resistant.

Finally, OnePlus Open ships with Android 13 and OxygenOS 13.2. The proprietary skin even borrows features like multi-window, drag-and-drop sharing, and a desktop-like taskbar from Samsung's One UI. And like the Galaxy Z Fold 5, the OnePlus Open will receive four years of major Android OS updates and five years of security patches.

Editor's note: OnePlus is a shadow of its former self, but the Open foldable phone brings back memories of a strong competitor to Samsung. It sounds promising, indeed.

OnePlus coined the term “flagship killer” years ago. It was a term reserved for phones that packed many flagship features yet didn't cost as much as other premium devices.

Although I wouldn't call the OnePlus Open a flagship killer, as it costs roughly the same as the Galaxy Z Fold 5, it does seem like a worthy rival. Maybe Samsung's Fold series has finally found a worthy challenger, which could lead to more innovation from the Korean tech giant.