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Winners and Losers: Oppo teases its first foldable as Android 12 bricks Samsung’s
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It’s Sunday, meaning it’s time for another edition of Winners and Losers and this week we’re looking at phones (or foldables, to be more precise).
We’re just two weeks from Christmas, but that doesn’t mean the tech world has been short of announcements.
The Game Awards took place on Thursday night, giving us a variety of new games to get excited about, including anew Star Wars gameandRumbleverse, a battle-royale from Epic Games. Google also announced that itsStadia cloud gaming service would be coming to LG smart TVs, giving gamers more ways to play at home.
December has also seen a number of end-of-year retrospective features launch across our favourite apps. A little over a week ago,Spotify WrappedandApple Music Replaytook over the internet as we reminisced on what songs we’d had on repeat in 2021, and now Instagram has begun compiling our Stories with itsPlaybackfeature.
Motorola also launched thefirst smartphonerunning on the newSnapdragon 8 Gen 1platform, but that wasn’t the mobile news that earned our coveted Winner (or less-coveted Loser) title this week…
Winner: Oppo
It’s been years since Oppo first filed a patent suggesting it was working on a foldable phone and rumours had recently begun picking up again. That was until this week when the Chinese tech brandofficially confirmed that the Find N was on its way.
While the company has yet to announce any specs, it did offer us our first proper look at the Find N’s design in a brief, 15 second video shared on its Weibo account.
The video shows a regular-sized external display, alongside a larger fold-out internal screen, making the phone look a lot like Samsung’sGalaxy Z Fold 3.
Just the other week, we heard whispers that the Find N would featurethe same 50-megapixel Sony IMX766 camera sensoras theOppo Find X3 Proand theOnePlus 9 Pro.
All of this isn’t even to mention theretractable camerasystem Oppo teased on Tuesday, which appears to physically pop out of the back of another Oppo phone.
We’ll have to wait until Oppo’s Inno Day event on December 15 to likely learn more about the new foldable and the retractable camera tech.
Loser: Samsung
Speaking of foldables, this week brought bad news for Samsung’s Z series users.
The company officially began rolling out One UI 4 (based onAndroid 12) on the Galaxy Z Fold 3 and theGalaxy Z Flip 3on Tuesday – before swiftlysuspending the updateas users began to report a myriad of problems with the software.
One UI 4 – which was supposed to bring features like a new colour palette, redesigned widgets and animations, new camera features and an easy-to-dissect Privacy Dashboard – instead appeared to cause a range of problems across the two foldable devices.
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Issues spotted on Samsung’s forums included slowed-down performance, problems with dark mode, flickering displays, broken camera apps, vanishing photos and trouble streaming video from Netflix and YouTube.
Some users even complained that their phones had entered into recovery mode due to the update, while others lamented that their devices had been bricked entirely.
Samsung has since paused the major software update as it addresses these problems, but its safe to say this wasn’t a good week for the company’s foldable line.
Hannah joined Trusted Reviews as a staff writer in 2019 after graduating with a degree in English from Royal Holloway, University of London. She’s also worked and studied in the US, holding positions …
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Founded in 2003, Trusted Reviews exists to give our readers thorough, unbiased and independent advice on what to buy.
Today, we have millions of users a month from around the world, and assess more than 1,000 products a year.
Editorial independence means being able to give an unbiased verdict about a product or company, with the avoidance of conflicts of interest. To ensure this is possible, every member of the editorial staff follows a clear code of conduct.
We also expect our journalists to follow clear ethical standards in their work. Our staff members must strive for honesty and accuracy in everything they do. We follow the IPSO Editors’ code of practice to underpin these standards.
