An adventure in flashing a European ROM on an Indian POCO F5 phone to try and enable NFC - does not work.

I purchased a Poco F5 5G in India at the beginning of 2025, and was surprised to see Google Wallet reporting that 'Tap' is not available on this device. There is no NFC toggle in the settings. This phone has NFC in all other countries. 

After some Googling, it seems that NFC hardware is either missing or software disabled in India. Some have enabled NFC by flashing the ROM with a global version, others have not been successful. I am sceptical, but I will give it a try.

In short summary, it does not work.  The hardware is missing in the phone manufactured in India.  Don't waste your time.

1. Settings, About phone, OS version, tap 7 times to enable developer mode.

2. Enable USB debugging.

3. Unlock bootloader. Needs a SIM.

4. adb.exe devices and accept connection on the phone screen

5. adb.exe shell reboot bootloader

6. fastboot.exe oem unlock (token verify fails)

7. Two-step extraction of marble_global_images_OS1.0.12.0.UMRMIXM_20241107.0000.00_14.0_global_a15f262d18.tgz

8. Copy the address of marble_global_images_OS1.0.12.0.UMRMIXM_20241107.0000.00_14.0_global_a15f262d18\marble_global_images_OS1.0.12.0.UMRMIXM_14.0 into the address bar area of the MiFlash tool.  Refresh leads to an unhandled exception.  Fix by following https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KaSCVJ3VrmY and try again.

9. Error  

10. To unlock the bootloader tried https://en.miui.com/unlock/download_en.html.  This is an old version that did not send OTPs. Tried some other unlock software like hypersploit, it probably did work but then I downloaded a new MiUnlock from another website and that worked and said that I had to wait another 73 hours.

 

11. Flashed with EU ROM 

 

 

12. Google pay does not work.  Google Pay says that the device does not meet security standards.

 

 

13.  I found a useful software on Google Play Store called NFC check which says that the phone does not have NFC.