Image 7 of 13 Routines are one of the most powerful tools in Google Home’s arsenal and they can be used to do just about anything – from adjusting your lights and thermostats to telling you about your upcoming calendar entries and playing your favourite podcast or radio station. There are also options to enable the sunrise alarm feature – which wakes you gradually over half an hour by increasing the display’s brightness – and to activate your “Good morning routine”. From here, you can toggle existing alarms on and off and set new ones, and decide whether you want them to repeat.
Swiping right through the interface reveals an additional card compared to what you’ll find on its larger siblings, too: an alarm menu. A long press on this screen gives you the option to choose from a range of different stylish clock faces, which you can customise to show the weather, reminders, alarm suggestions and more. With no Ambient Mode that you find on other Google Assistant-powered smart displays, the Smart Clock defaults to a large clock on its homescreen. This is a very nice touch.īuy now from the BT Store Lenovo Smart Clock review: Clock and alarm features
By swiping up from the bottom of the screen and opening Display Settings, you can also set the Smart Clock to use a monochrome clock and a “darker” minimum brightness at night so it never wakes you. The Smart Clock makes it easy to read what’s on the screen, regardless of the light conditions, because it has an ambient light sensor that adjusts the brightness according to your surroundings. For reading the time and viewing calendar entries, it’s more than adequate and the screen appears bright with vibrant colours. That’s not especially high-resolution for a screen of its size, but it’s not really a problem when the Smart Clock isn’t intended for looking at photos or video. Image 13 of 13 As for the smart speaker’s 4in screen, it’s an 800 x 480 panel. To stop it from sliding around on your bedside table, the Smart Clock has two grippy rubber strips on its underside – one at the front and one at the rear. Two buttons on its top let you control the speaker’s volume, while the Smart Clock’s rectangular rear houses a USB-A port alongside a power input and the mute switch for the microphone. Unlike Google’s Nest Hub, which resembles a tablet stuck to a pumice stone, the Lenovo speaker is a single, cohesive unit covered entirely in fabric – and it looks all the better for it. Lenovo Smart Clock review: Design and displayĭominated by its 4in screen when viewed from the front, Lenovo’s Smart Clock is a small, cute and boxy thing. If you’re more interested in having a traditional alarm clock radio than smart features, you might be better off with something such as the Pure Siesta Rise. It’s not primarily intended as an alarm clock but comes with a front-facing camera for making video calls and a 3.5mm audio port. With its 5.5in display, though, Amazon’s recently announced Echo Show 5 arguably represents the Smart Clock’s greatest competition in terms of value for money. If you want that kind of thing, you’ll need a larger Smart Display or Google’s recently rebranded Nest Hub. As the user interface has been rethought for its tiny 4in display, there’s also no Home View dropdown or any Ambient Mode for displaying your Google Photos albums. That’s no bad thing unless you particularly feel the need to make video calls from bed. Lenovo Smart Clock review: What you need to knowĪside from its considerably smaller physical size, the main difference between the Smart Clock and Lenovo’s larger Smart Displays is that the company has done away with the front-facing camera. That smaller design brings some compromises, which I’ll come to below, but overall the Smart Clock is a worthy addition to Lenovo’s growing smart speaker family. In many ways, it’s the perfect introduction to Google’s Home ecosystem it can do practically anything its larger stablemates can, but at £80 it’s firmly within impulse purchase territory.Īlong with telling the time and setting alarms, you can use it to play music and radio, interact with Google Assistant and control smart home devices such as light bulbs, Nest cameras and coffee machines.
First announced at CES 2019, Lenovo’s Smart Clock is a teeny-weeny smart display that’s designed to sit atop your bedside table.
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