Today Oppo launched the Find N5, the thinnest book-style foldable phone yet, but there’s more to the phone than a slim design: it’s capable of connecting to a Mac for file transfers and even remote control. It’s not quite the first Android phone to do so, but it is the only one you can buy outside of China.
To link the Find N5 with a Mac you first have to install Oppo’s O Plus Connect app on the Mac, which will be available from Oppo’s website — I’ve been testing out a beta version. Linking the Mac to the phone is quick so long as they’re on the same Wi-Fi network, with all the phone’s controls built into the “Connection & sharing” section of its Settings app.
As long as the two phones remain on the same network, you can browse the phone’s files directly from the Mac and transfer them wirelessly — in itself a coup, given that even wired file-sharing between Android phones and Macs is clunky and reliant on third-party software.
More impressive is the remote control option, which mirrors the Mac’s display to the phone. You can use it full-screen, or better still fold the phone halfway to create a miniature laptop. This works so long as both devices are online, but unlike file-sharing they don’t need to be on the same network.
Oppo has created a few ways to use macOS from the dinky touchscreen. You can turn the bottom half of the display into a keyboard for the laptop experience, or instead use it as a trackpad — complete with multi-touch gesture support. Other options include a clunky on-screen mouse and some buttons that recreate common keyboard shortcuts.
Don’t get me wrong, using this is all still pretty clunky. The screen is too small to be entirely usable, and macOS wasn’t designed with touch gestures in mind, so tapping is a hit-or-miss replacement for a mouse. I tried it out a few times over my week with the phone, and while it was usually smooth, on one occasion it was laggy enough to be absolutely unusable. I wouldn’t even want to be reliant on this to work, but I can see the appeal in a pinch.
The file sharing is the more straightforwardly useful part of this. It’s an expansion of Oppo’s existing O Plus Connect app for iPhones and iPads, which has allowed file-sharing between Oppo, OnePlus, and Realme phones and those Apple devices since last year. A similar app supports file-sharing with Windows PCs, but the remote control option added for Macs is a first.
A first for Oppo, that is. Another Chinese phone manufacturer, Vivo, introduced a similar option in April 2024 that I haven’t had the chance to try. That’s because it’s only available on Vivo phones running OriginOS, the company’s China-exclusive take on Android. With the Find N5 launching worldwide — except for the US, where sister brand OnePlus has announced it won’t launch the phone — this is the first time Macs and Android phones have gotten this close in the rest of the world.
Oppo says there are plans to roll the feature out to more phones, but we’ll have to wait to see which and when — and whether that includes the OnePlus handsets available in the US.
Photography by Dominic Preston / noti.group
[Notigroup Newsroom in collaboration with other media outlets, with information from the following sources]
