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.
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.
Anne Wojcicki attends the WSJ Magazine Style & Tech Dinner in Atherton, California, on March 15, 2023.
Kelly Sullivan | Getty Images Entertainment | Getty Images
23andMe CEO Anne Wojcicki and New Mountain Capital have submitted a proposal to take the embattled genetic testing company private, according to a Friday filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
Wojcicki and New Mountain have offered to acquire all of 23andMe’s outstanding shares in cash for $2.53 per share, or an equity value of approximately $74.7 million. The company’s stock closed at $2.42 on Friday with a market cap of about $65 million.
The offer comes after a turbulent year for 23andMe, with the stock losing more than 80% of its value in 2024. In January, the company announced plans to explore strategic alternatives, which could include a sale of the company or its assets, a restructuring or a business combination.
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23andMe has a special committee of independent directors in place to evaluate potential paths forward. The company appointed three new independent directors to its board in October after all seven of its previous directors abruptly resigned the prior month. The special committee has to approve Wojcicki and New Mountain’s proposal.
“We believe that our Proposal provides compelling value and immediate liquidity to the Company’s public stockholders,” Wojcicki and Matthew Holt, managing director and president of private equity at New Mountain, wrote in a letter to the special committee on Thursday.
Wojcicki previously submitted a proposal to take the company private for 40 cents per share in July, but it was rejected by the special committee, in part because the members said it lacked committed financing and did not provide a premium to the closing price at the time.
Wojcicki and New Mountain are willing to provide secured debt financing to fund 23andMe’s operations through the transaction’s closing, the filing said. New Mountain is based in New York and has $55 billion of assets under management, according to its website.
Shares of Hims & Hers Health tumbled more than 23% on Friday after the U.S. Food and Drug Administration announced that the shortage of semaglutide injection products has been resolved.
Semaglutide is the active ingredient in Novo Nordisk‘s blockbuster weight loss drug Wegovy and diabetes treatment Ozempic. Those medications are part of a class of drugs called GLP-1s, and demand for the treatments has exploded in recent years. As a result, digital health companies such as Hims & Hers have been prescribing compounded semaglutide as an alternative for patients who are navigating volatile supply hurdles and insurance obstacles.
Compounded drugs are custom-made alternatives to brand-name drugs designed to meet a specific patient’s needs, and compounders are allowed to produce them when brand-name treatments are in shortage. The FDA doesn’t review the safety and efficacy of compounded products.
Hims & Hers began offering compounded semaglutide to patients in May, and it owns compounding pharmacies that produce the medications.
Compounded medications are typically much cheaper than their branded counterparts. Hims & Hers sells compounded semaglutide for less than $200 per month, while Ozempic and Wegovy both cost around $1,000 per month without insurance.
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The FDA said Friday that it will start taking action against compounders for violations in the next 60 to 90 days, depending on the type of facility, in order to “avoid unnecessary disruption to patient treatment.”
“Now that the FDA has determined the drug shortage for semaglutide has been resolved, we will continue to offer access to personalized treatments as allowed by law to meet patient needs,” Hims & Hers CEO Andrew Dudum posted Friday on X. “We’re also closely monitoring potential future shortages, as Novo Nordisk stated two weeks ago that it would continue to have ‘capacity limitations’ and ‘expected continued periodic supply constraints and related drug shortage notifications.'”
Him & Hers’ weight loss offerings have been a massive hit with investors. Shares of the company climbed more than 200% last year, and the stock is already up more than 100% this year despite Friday’s move.
Even before it added compounded GLP-1s to its portfolio, the company said in its 2023 fourth-quarter earnings call that it expects its weight loss program to bring in more than $100 million in revenue by the end of 2025.
Despite the turbulent regulatory landscape, Hims & Hers has showed no signs of slowing down.
On Friday, the company announced it has acquired a U.S.-based peptide facility that will “further verticalize the company’s long-term ability to deliver personalized medications.” Hims & Hers will explore advances across metabolic optimization, recovery science, biological resistances, cognitive performance and preventative health through the acquisition, the company said.
That move comes just days after Hims & Hers also bought Trybe Labs, the New Jersey-based at-home lab testing facility. Trybe Labs will allow Hims & Hers to perform at-home blood draws and more comprehensive pretreatment testing.
Hims & Hers did not disclose the terms of either deal.
Tesla models Y and 3 are displayed at a Tesla dealership in Corte Madera, California, on Dec. 20, 2024.
Justin Sullivan | Getty Images
Tesla is voluntarily recalling 376,241vehicles in the U.S. to correct an issue with failing power-assisted steering systems, according to records posted to the website of the U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.
In a safety recall report posted on the NHTSA website, Tesla said the recall includes Model 3 and Model Y vehicles that were manufactured for sale in the U.S. from Feb. 28, 2023, to October 11, 2023, and that were equipped with a certain older software release.
The records said printed circuit boards in the steering systems in affected vehicles could become overstressed, causing the power-assist steering to fail in some cases when a Tesla vehicle rolled to a stop and then accelerated.
When electronic power-assist steering systems fail in a Tesla, drivers need to exert more force to steer their cars, which can increase the risk of a collision.
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Tesla told the vehicle safety regulator that it was not aware of any crashes, injuries or deaths related to the power steering failures, and that it was offering an over-the-air software update as a remedy.
The recall follows an earlier related probe and voluntary recall in China concerning the same systems.
President Donald Trump has appointed Tesla CEO Elon Musk to lead a team that is slashing the federal government workforce, and in some cases, regulations and entire agencies. Those cuts already affected the NHTSA, an agency Musk has long seen as standing in the way of some of his ambitions at Tesla.
The regulator has been engaged in a yearslong investigation into safety defects in the systems that Tesla markets currently as its Autopilot and Full Self-Driving (Supervised) options. The features do not make Tesla cars into robotaxis. They require a human driver ready to steer or brake at any time.
The Washington Post reported on Thursday that Musk’s team has led mass firings at the NHTSA, reducing the agency’s workforce and capacity to investigate companies including Tesla by about 10%.