Fenix 5 series and Chronos - 22.40 Beta Release

Useless without a working barometer?

What do you do with your watch?

The barometer can be used for altitude, but that's just as unreliable as gps for altitude.

The barometer can be used for stormalerts, which never have worked for me. This one would be closest to a must have feature if you do long hikes in the mountains.

The barometer is used during trailrunning to detect hills and switch to the ascent/decent screen (personally I find that super annoying, because I use navigation a lot during trailrunning and I don't want it to switch away from the navigation screen).

Missing any of these wouldn't make a watch unusable for me. Do I miss some feature?

(just being curious)

I use it to navigate in the mountains. I work as an alpine mountain guide and need a gps with reliable barometric altitude.
It's not too much to ask for a £500 watch, my 30yr old Casio is more accurate.
GPS altitude uses too much battery and still cannot measure change in air pressure which is used to monitor the weather, another important feature which is essential for my work.

Fair enough.

Although your watch can either use barometer for altitude or for airpressure changes. 

But I'm not a fan of using a barometer for altitude. I used to do hanggliging and used a vario with a much better barometer than garmin puts in their watches. Normally I would set one of the two barometer in my vario to show 0 altitude at the landing ground. Go up the maintain, wait for good conditions, fly around and go to the landing zone. Then it was not unusually for the barometer I use for landing to show an altitude of about 100 meters and not the 0 is calibrated it to. (not a big deal, you should land on visuals, not instruments anyway)

Barometer is great for detecting changes in altitude quicker than a gps, so essential for flying in thermals. But for general altitude? Just as good/bad as gps. In my experience there is no such thing as a reliable barometric alltitude. 

But I do agree with you that the barometer on garmin watches is really lousy. Well, Garmin is driven by marketing and for them it's more important to have a long featurelist than actually working or usefull features, so they included the barometer (and thermometer) anyway as a feature. 

I upgraded my fenix 5 from 22.20 to  22.40 which became available on Garmin express yesterday. Thankfully the altitude barometer is working correctly again. 

Well done guys, hoping this fixes the issue of device freezing (green logo) when navigating larger courses.