On October 19, the company launched the Find N3 flip phone, which has a large 7.8-inch internal screen to compete with products like Samsung's Galaxy Fold 5 and Google's Pixel Fold. According to Oppo , the Find N3 is equipped with hinge technology that can fold one million times.
This is also the first time the Chinese phone company's most advanced camera system has been equipped on a foldable device. The Find N3 runs on the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 5G chip manufactured by Qualcomm, has a listed price of $ 1,750 and can be ordered from today (October 20).
Previously, in August, Oppo launched the Find N3 Flip clamshell for the international market, with a triple-camera cluster and a large external screen, allowing users to use more than 80 applications without opening the phone.
Oppo's international marketing director, Elvis Chu, said the company wants to make a breakthrough with foldable phones in the high-end market.
“The popularity of foldable phones is a significant growth driver for the future of the smartphone industry,” said Elvis Chu, explaining that although the number of foldable devices only accounts for a small percentage of the total market, their price and popularity among high-end consumers make these models commercially valuable.
Global foldable smartphone shipments grew 64% in the first quarter to 2.5 million units, compared to a 14.2% decline in the overall mobile phone market, according to Counterpoint Research. China is the world's largest foldable smartphone market, growing 117% in the first three months of 2023.
Last month, Huawei Technologies, the mainland smartphone market leader, launched its foldable Mate X5. Oppo ranked second in the Chinese foldable market with a 27% share, according to Counterpoint, thanks to the launch of the Find N2 in late 2022. The Find N2 Flip, along with Huawei’s Pocket S, are the two most popular clamshell phones there.
Deeply integrating AI into smartphones
Oppo is focusing on artificial intelligence (AI) research as competition among smartphone makers integrating services similar to ChatGPT heats up.
The Chinese phone maker is working on its own large language model (LLM) development project called AndesGPT.
“We are very optimistic about the future integration of AI and LLM applications on smartphones,” said Jason Liao, president of Oppo Research Institute.
LLMs are algorithms that use deep learning techniques and massive datasets to understand, summarize, generate, and predict new content. LLMs like GPT-3 have revolutionized conversational AI, allowing chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT to understand and generate human-like text.
However, Oppo will need to address the challenges of the computing power required to run LLM on a mobile phone, rather than always being connected to the Internet to access the cloud.
According to the head of the China Mobile Research Institute, computer vision is a potential technology to be applied on the company's phones. This technology allows for the recognition of objects as well as people in images or videos.
Oppo introduced AndesGPT in August for testing, aiming to upgrade the Xiaobu voice assistant (like Siri) in interactions with users.
Currently, ChatGPT is not available in China, so mainland manufacturers need to develop and compete to integrate similar applications like ChatGPT, a technology that is considered a game changer in a highly competitive market.
Oppo's rival Vivo also announced plans to launch an AI model in its new operating system OriginOS 4 earlier this week, after Huawei Technologies integrated Pangu AI into its latest HarmonyOS version in August.
(According to SCMP)
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