20 October 2023
This will likely seem like a niche post, and I’m OK with that. But, buried in a side-load only, no-new-feature, beta release 14.05 for the Instinct 2 series yesterday was a notable line item:
“Removed the limitation on the number of points allowed in a course.”
I usually only briefly skim these release e-mails when I don’t see the words “Add” at the top, indicating adding new features. Instead, this e-mail was full of “Fixed” line items, of course totally normal for the beta process. However, for whatever reason this one caught my eye, and boom – finally!
For those that haven’t had he pleasure of this particular “by design” bug, essentially, Garmin devices have a limit on the number of “points” in a pre-planned course (route) file. That means if you loaded up some longer (but not really long) routes to your Instinct device (any generation), it’d fail. Technically it’d still work, but then some unknown distance through the route it’d stop giving you turn notifications. When you initially load the route, you’d get this:
Now, this ‘by design’ feature was even more infuriating because there was no discernible/listable actual limit. Technically the limit was “50 course points”, except, the definition of a “course point” was fuzzy at best, and non-existent in most scenarios. It was not a given turn quantity, nor a preset distance, or even the number of times you passed a waterfall with an ice cream stand. Instead, it was entirely nebulous, based in part on which tool you used to create the route, and how curvy the route was. Thus, I had routes as short as 10mi (for real) trip/break it, and routes as long as 50KM not trip it. You never knew, until you were at the trailhead ready to begin, and found the failure.
As a reminder, here’s what I said in the summary section of the recent Garmin Instinct 2X review this past spring – taking up about 25% of that final summary section:
Now for many, this unit will fit the bill well. However, I can’t help but be (extremely) disappointed at the continued max course point issue. Last year in my Instinct 2 review, I outlined the problems with this, and here we are 14 months later and somehow – in 2023 – this is still a thing. Most other Garmin devices don’t have this issue, or at least this low of a threshold. The fact is that we have a watch designed to last literally forever in terms of battery life, yet can’t navigate a mere 10 miles before it stops properly navigating. Again, this shouldn’t be an issue this decade, and certainly not from Garmin, of all companies.
Like I said, it was kinda mind-boggling these even existed.
But with beta version 14.05, this limitation is now gone. In order to test this, here’s the 110KM route on the same watch, back-to-back after the upgrade. At left, showing the failure, and at right, showing it…well…working (can’t really show an error message that doesn’t exist – so here’s a pretty elevation profile instead – no error message):
Now technically speaking the limitation also exists in Garmin’s other watches, but the limit is much higher (historically). The Fenix/Epix/etc range and the Forerunner were set for considerably higher limits, so it was a bit harder to hit those course limits. Nonetheless, this change will be rolled into future firmware updates for other products like the Fenix 7 & Epix series, which already had higher limits.
Either way, super good to see this finally fixed/addressed.
With that, thanks for reading!