Chinese smartphone firm Oppo launches slim $1,870 folding phone to rival Samsung, Huawei
Oppo’s new Find N5 folding smartphone on display at a press briefing in London.
Ryan Browne | CNBC
Chinese smartphone firm Oppo has unveiled its new flagship folding phone Thursday, touting a slimmer body and artificial intelligence-focused features in a bid to compete with high-end foldable devices from the likes of Samsung and Huawei.
The company’s Find N5 phone that can fold in half, will retail at a starting price of 2,499 Singapore dollars ($1,867.70).
When it’s folded shut, the Find N5 looks like a normal bar-shaped phone with a 6.62-inch display. The device can then be folded outward to show a larger, 8.12-inch tablet.
Most notably, the phone has an ultra-thin design. When closed, it measures 8.93 millimeters thick, while when opened out in tablet form, the Find N5 has a depth of 4.21 millimeters.
That’s slimmer than Samsung’s Galaxy Fold 6, which the South Korean tech giant released last year.
Inside the device is a razer-thin 5,600 milliampere-hour (mAh) battery that’s no bigger than a credit card. Oppo said the battery incorporates a silicon-carbon material, which enables high battery capacity despite its small size.
Oppo is hoping it can win business from the likes of Samsung and Chinese tech giant Huawei, both major smartphone players seeking to shake the market out of an innovation slowdown with flashy new models that can bend.
AI assistant features
Like many other smartphone makers, Oppo is investing more into artificial intelligence-focused features on the device.
The Oppo Find N5 has a triple-camera setup that includes a telephoto lens that can zoom in up to 30x thanks to assistance from an AI-powered image enhancement feature, dubbed AI Telescope Zoom.
It also comes with a personal AI assistant that can interpret and summarize documents, generate summaries of phone calls and translate video calls and other content displayed on the screen.
Addressing concerns around privacy, Oppo said that some data is processed directly on the device while other information is stored in the cloud. In international markets, Oppo is using Google as its AI and cloud computing technology partner.
An Oppo spokesman told CNBC the company “strictly abides by local laws, regulations and privacy security protection requirements.”
Samsung recently launched additional AI capabilities on its new flagship Galaxy S25 series, including the ability to carry out tasks across multiple apps when prompted and integration of Google’s Gemini AI assistant.
Controlling a Mac with an Android phone
Oppo also talked up a new feature that enables users to connect their phone to a Mac computer. Using an app called O+ Connect, users can link the Find N5 to any Mac desktop machine and instantly transfer photos and other files between devices — so long as they’re connected to the same Wi-Fi network.
Users can also choose to remotely control a Mac from the Find N5. The Mac’s display can shut off and then reappear on the Find N5’s screen. The remote control feature only requires mobile internet or Wi-Fi to sync up a Mac device’s data with the Find N5 in real-time.
The feature uses public macOS application programming interfaces, which enable two different apps to communicate with each other. Oppo said O+ Connect “fully complies with macOS platform and software regulations.”
Ben Wood, chief analyst at market research firm CCS Insight, told CNBC the Find N5 “shows the art of the possible when engineering a product with flexible display technology.”
Wood added that, while Huawei’s triple-screened Mate XT led to some fanfare, “commercially I think the smart money is still on the book-like form factor already offered by Samsung, Honor, Google and now Oppo.”
Samsung teased a trifold smartphone prototype at its January Unpacked event for the launch of the Galaxy S25. It’s not clear yet if the phone is a product Samsung will launch commercially anytime soon.
Technology
Waymo will update driverless fleet after San Francisco blackout to improve navigation during outages
A Waymo car is halted on the road amid a power outage in San Francisco, California, U.S., December 20, 2025, in this screengrab obtained from a social media video.d
Reuters
Three days after a blackout in San Francisco caused Waymo to pause its driverless car service, the Alphabet-owned company said it’s updating its fleet so its vehicles are better prepared to respond during future outages.
“We’ve always focused on developing the Waymo Driver for the world as it is, including when infrastructure fails,” the company said in a blog post late Tuesday.
Power outages began early afternoon on Saturday in San Francisco and peaked roughly two hours later, affecting about 130,000 customers, according to Pacific Gas and Electric. As of Sunday morning, about 21,000 customers remained without power. PG&E said a fire at a substation resulted in “significant and extensive” damage.
With stoplights and traffic signals not functioning, the city was hit with widespread gridlock. Videos shared on social media appeared to show multiple Waymo vehicles stalled in traffic in various neighborhoods.
“We directed our fleet to pull over and park appropriately so we could return vehicles to our depots in waves,” Waymo said in Tuesday’s blog post. “This ensured we did not further add to the congestion or obstruct emergency vehicles during the peak of the recovery effort.”
San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie said in an update on X Saturday evening that police officers, fire crews, parking control officers and city ambassadors were deployed across affected neighborhoods.
Waymo said that it’s analyzing the event, and is taking three “immediate steps.”
The first involves “fleet-wide updates” to give vehicles “more context about regional outages,” so cars can take more decisive actions at intersections. The company said it’s also improving its “emergency response protocols,” and is coordinating with Mayor Lurie’s team in San Francisco to better collaborate in emergency preparedness. Finally, Waymo said it’s updating its first responder training “as we discover learnings from this and other widespread events.”
In addition to the Bay Area, Waymo currently serves paid rides to the public in and around Austin, Texas, Phoenix, Atlanta and Los Angeles. The company recently crossed an estimated 450,000 weekly paid rides, and said in December it had served 14 million trips in 2025, putting it on pace to end the year at more than 20 million trips total since launching in 2020.
“Backed by 100M+ miles of fully autonomous driving experience and a record of improving road safety, we are undaunted by the opportunity to challenge the status quo of our roads, and we’re proud to continue serving San Franciscan residents and visitors,” the company said in Tuesday’s blog.
— CNBC’s Lora Kolodny and Jennifer Elias contributed to this report.
WATCH: Waymo service resumes after errors cause issues in San Francisco
Direxion signage at the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) in New York, US, on Monday, Dec. 22, 2025. The holiday-shortened week started with gains in stocks amid a broad advance that saw a continuation of the bullish momentum on Wall Street.
Michael Nagle | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Motive, a company with software for managing corporate trucks and drivers, on Tuesday filed for an initial public offering on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol “MTVE.”
The paperwork puts Motive among a fast-growing group of tech companies looking to go public in 2026. Anthropic, OpenAI and SpaceX have all reportedly considered making their shares widely available for trading next year.
Motive is smaller, reporting a $62.7 million net loss on $115.8 million in revenue in the third quarter. The loss widened from $41.3 million in the same quarter of 2024, while revenue grew about 23% year over year. The company had almost 100,000 clients at the end of September.
Ryan Johns, Obaid Khan and Shoaib Makani started Motive in 2013, originally under the name Keep Truckin. Makani, the CEO, is Khan’s brother-in-law.
Investors include Alphabet’s GV, Base10 Partners, Greenoaks, Index Ventures, Kleiner Perkins and Scale Venture Partners.
Motive’s AI Dashcam device for detecting unsafe driving “has prevented 170,000 collisions and saved 1,500 lives on our roads,” Makani wrote in a letter to investors. Most revenue comes from subscriptions, although Motive does sell replacement hardware and professional services.
The San Francisco company changed its name to Motive in 2022, and as of Sept. 30, it employed 4,508 people. Motive employs 400 full-time data annotators who apply labels that are meant to enhance artificial intelligence models.
Motive has ongoing patent-infringement litigation with competitor Samsara, which went public in 2021 and today has a $22 billion market capitalization.
WATCH: AI IPO boom next year? The changing 2026 IPO landscape
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