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Oppo Is Getting Into the Folding Phone and Smart Glasses Game

Zachariah Kelly Avatar
Zachariah Kelly
Oppo Is Getting Into the Folding Phone and Smart Glasses Game

Oppo is one to play with innovative tech, revealing both a rollable phone and an under-screen camera earlier this year. And at its own CES-skirting event this week, Oppo Inno Day 2021, the company kept the good times rolling.

Oppo Inno Day 2021 was held on December 14 and December 15, live-streamed from Oppo’s Twitter account. Here’s everything they announced.

The Oppo Find N

The Oppo Find N is Oppo’s first flagship foldable phone, most comparable to the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold. Oppo’s tag line with the Find N is “From Novelty to Necessity” – so maybe with this device, we’ll start to see a greater need for foldable phones.

“To us, the name Find N represents new possibilities,” Oppo said in a press release.

“We are ushering in the next chapter of smartphones: the revolutionary experience of this new form factor will undeniably shake up the industry.”

The Oppo Find N will be available in China from December 23, 2021. It features a Snapdragon 888 processor, an Adreno 660 GPU, 12GB of RAM, 512GB storage capacity and a 4,500 mAh battery. No word on if it will come to other markets just yet. It comes in black, white and purple. The phone will cost 7,699 Yuan, so about A$1,700.

Oppo Smart Glasses

Yes, Oppo is entering the world of Smart Glasses, following behind TCL, Facebook and the oddly hopping along Google Glass. Oppo’s ‘assisted reality’ Air Glass smart glasses include a micro projector and touch, voice, gesture and head movement interaction methods.

No word on when the Oppo Air Glass will come to Australia just yet (they’ll be released in China in Q1 2022). We also don’t know the price just yet either. For now, we’ve seen them capable of displaying text on a lens and giving you local area information (along with body temperature information) but that’s all we have so far.

Oppo MariSilicon X

An announcement not as visually thrilling as a new folding phone or a pair of smart glasses, Oppo has developed a neural processing unit called MariSilicon X. The chip is intended to improve AI and photo capture and editing. If it sounds similar, that’s because Google did pretty much the same thing with its Tensor Chip. Oppo says this new chip will debut in the Oppo Find X4 series of phones, due out in 2022.

Oppo’s retractable phone camera

Developed so far as an in-house experiment without an intended release device, Oppo has developed a smartphone camera that extends and retracts.

While the novelty of a retractable phone camera is nice, Oppo has detailed some of the specs the device is capable of. It provides an ‘equivalent focal length’ of 52mm and allows for a large 1/1.56-inch Sony IMX766 sensor to be housed in the device. It’s also supposedly water and dust-resistant, although an IP rating is yet to be confirmed.

Oppo Inno Day 2021 was very metaverse-y

One final thing – although Oppo Inno Day 2021 took place across two live streams this week, Oppo had developed an explorable “Oppo Inno World” to dive into on the reveal days. You can still access it and walk around Inno World.

That’s about everything new announced at Oppo’s Inno Day 2021 event. A folding phone, a new chip and a pair of smart glasses. We’re keen to see what the future holds for Oppo.