Apple CEO Tim Cook and Phil Schiller, Apple’s senior VP of worldwide marketing, may have wowed the faithful at the iPhone 5 keynote kickoff on September 12th but not all of the stats the suits were trumpeting stand up to scrutiny. Schiller heralded the iPhone 5 by stating “It’s the thinnest and lightest iPhone we’ve ever made, and best of all, it’s the world’s thinnest smartphone.”
While the first part of his praise can’t be argued, Schiller should have quit while he was ahead, before the “best of all” boast. In his defense, perhaps Schiller wasn’t aware of a little-known Chinese smartphone manufacturer called OPPO and their very thin smartphone, the OPPO Finder.
The OPPO Finder isn’t a 4G phone and it’s only available in China. Introduced this past June, the phone is just 6.65mm thick – that’s 2.65mm thinner than the iPhone 4S and 0.95mm thinner than the iPhone 5. That’s it in the image above, sandwiched between a pair of iPhone 4s’s
Let’s take things a step further. The OPPO Finder features a raised ring around its camera lens, bulging the phone’s thickness to 7.1mm… still 0.5mm thinner than the 7.6mm iPhone 5.
Several other competitive smartphones out-slim the iPhone 5 as well, most notably Motorola’s original Droid RAZR for Verizon at 7.1mm and the Chinese Huawei Ascend P1 S at 6.68mm. Both of these phones feature camera lens bulges that break through the 7.6mm thickness of the iPhone 5, however.
Yet another challenger, potentially at least, is the 6.2mm thick Athena from China’s ZTE. Announced just a few days after OPPO released the Finder, the Athena still awaits an official release date.
Until then, the OPPO Finder rules the roost as the slimmest smartphone out there. See it here and here; just be sure not to hold it sideways when you do. (via Android Guys, TechRadar, Droid Life, and Android Community)
