Winners and Losers: Oppo teases its first foldable as Android 12 bricks Samsung’s

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 a new Star Wars game and Rumbleverse, a battle-royale from Epic Games. Google also announced that its Stadia 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 Wrapped and Apple Music Replay took 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 its Playback feature. 

Motorola also launched the first smartphone running on the new Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 platform, 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 brand officially 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’s Galaxy Z Fold 3. 

Just the other week, we heard whispers that the Find N would feature the same 50-megapixel Sony IMX766 camera sensor as the Oppo Find X3 Pro and the OnePlus 9 Pro. 

All of this isn’t even to mention the retractable camera system 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 on Android 12) on the Galaxy Z Fold 3 and the Galaxy Z Flip 3 on Tuesday – before swiftly suspending the update as 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. 

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.