Xiaomi Delays NFC Support on Mi 5s Plus, Gets Sued by Customer in the Court

On September 27th, the Chinese smartphone brand Xiaomi has launched the Mi 5s and Mi 5s Plus smartphones as the successors to Mi 5 that was first showcased at MWC 2016.  A few weeks back, they also launched the Mi Note 2 with dual curved glass and also the Mi MIX concept smartphone. Apart from the high-end specifications, Xiaomi has one more new feature in common with all these devices. These devices will feature NFC and fingerprint sensor for making secure authorization of mobile payments using Mi Pay. It can even be used as physical bus and metro cards replacement. While this same feature is announced with Mi 5, all these features are never made available for the consumers.

At the Mi 5s and Mi 5s Plus launch event, Xiaomi announced the fully featured NFC options to be available for both the devices. The device listing on the company’s official website mentioned that all these features will be available with the stable MIUI 8 update that is said to be released by the end of October. Now, even after two weeks after the mentioned time, the company hasn’t released the update. From translating the device listing page on the Xiaomi’s Chinese website, now it is expected to get the MIUI update by the end of this year featuring full-fledged NFC options. We guess the company might have updated the listing without leaving any note.

The Mi 5s Plus will be supporting three modes of NFC including card mode, point to point (P2P) mode, and card reader. To make use of all NFC-based payments, the swiping machines need to support NFC. For bus and metro cards, most of the cities are using the latest technology that supports NFC by default. The Mi 5s Plus with 4GB and 6GB RAM options went on sale starting from September 29th in China. Now a Chinese Mi 5s Plus user named Zhang has sued the company for false information. He brought the all new Mi 5s Plus smartphone from Mi Store on October 15th only after reading that the complete NFC features supporting bank, bus, and metro cards will be available by the end of October.

He waited till November 1st for MIUI 8 update, and later he asked the company for refund and compensation for false advertising. As the refund was unsuccessful, the user has filled a case in one of the district courts of Beijing. Interestingly, the court accepted the case yesterday in accordance with the Consumer Protection Act. The case is under further investigation, and we can only know get the complete information after the judgment. This is not happening for the first time for Xiaomi. In 2014, the company was accused of showing the wrong number of devices sold during the flash sales in Taiwan. Though the company had apologized, it faced a fine of NT$ 6,00,000 (approx $18,800 / Rs. 12,74,000).

Later in 2015, Xiaomi has violated the strict advertising laws of China where the usage of superlatives are banned including the ‘best’ which is used by the company. Coming to the latest case, we can only share more information once there is any update from the company or after the final judgment is announced. Stay tuned on Phone Radar for more update!