Is there any noticeable improvement from 11.12 to 12.27 ?

OK , Interesting that a GPX created from Garmin site gives a different reading but that much in another site.

I can't figure out what's going on since the GPS on the 955 clearly generates GPX tracks that look good and have the correct distances on any GPX program I used...It must be some weird firmware distance calculation issue but no one else is reporting it. What bothers me more is that during my initial interaction with Garmin CS, Garmin engineering thought that this is within spec...They are taking another look at it now and we'll see.

very strange and i have not experienced this at all. my 955 has been very consistent distance wise (except for early problems with GPS only with the firmware that came with the watch (9.XX?). the 955 has also been consistent with my 945LTE and 935 and 735XT overall for distances, but much better at instantaneous pace using All Satellites.

idgsd1 do you link to Strava? what does it report your distances as? [i just reread your later post and it seems that Strava would give you the same distance if the GPX file seems right]

i assume you've also tried rebooting the watch. i'm guessing Garmin would want you to try a factory reset too, but that's not fun since it would ruin your HRV stats which don't carry over with syncing

Maybe this explains a degradation of my pace on circuits i run before with the FR 945. I can exclude a drop of fitness. 

I don’t have a Strava link but I see no reason it should be any different than other GPX programs. Regarding a reset, I reset it numerous times with no improvement. I then did a complete factory reset (erased everything). On the first subsequent trail walk it started good for about 1 km or so and then again started counting distance short. All future walks were bad from the start. Really weird…

BTW, just to make it clear, the short distance “accumulation” is linear. ie, every intermediate distance along the route is short by about the same percentage.

They reduced watch face time font, no idea why! Made it worse to read. The face is the one with 3 balls below.

derek87 said:

no real improvements in 12.27 for me except:

- SatIQ: only one test...not real difference between it and All Satellites and i'm just going to stick with All Satellites

- backlight issue fixed (where certain glances would activate backlight even if backlight was set to off)

overall, i'm content with 12.27. while running power and other new features are potential nice to haves, my only wishes right now are that they fix 2 core issues:

1. maps behave like they do on the Fenix7/Epix2

2. they fix the GPS logging stop when a hotkey is used (this problem has existed since the 945LTE.

these seem like reasonable fixes, but who knows how long it will take to see the fixes come.

Good overview. I agree, but I would definitely add the CIQ data fields crash if you *Resume later* on an activity" to the must-fix list. The issue was introduced in 12.20 and is VERY annoying.

If I practiced swimming, I would be also angry with all issues connected - wrong pool count, incorrect GPS distance, etc.

Other than these mentioned issues, I am satisfied with 12.27. Hopefully Garmin won't again break some working stuff in the next release.

My 955 has also been very consistent. In clear sky conditions on a beach run it gives exactly the same distance as my vivoactive3 did, which is accurate to about 1%.

On a course with lots of tree cover and many 90° turns, it's much more accurate than the va3 which always under-recorded the distance by about 10-15%. In fact, the 955 consistently reads that course as about 5% over the expected 5km distance for the four laps.

Other courses (10km, 21.1km) are measured within 1% of what I get from a course planner (either Garmin's or plotaroute.com).

I've not seen Garmin Connect and Strava disagree on distances by more than a few metres or PR times by more than a second.

So it turns out I had an old Strava account I haven't used in years (completely forgot about it). I just uploaded my morning walk GPX to Strava and what do you know.. The Strava activity distance was 6.28 km while the 955 measured distance was 5.83 km, about 7% on the short side. BTW, the Garmin 7s I was wearing on my other wrist showed 6.26 km.