We live in an interconnected smart world. We’ve got smartphones, smartwatches, smart
homes. We haven’t gotten around to too many smart people yet, but what we do have is this:
a smart clock. Because why not?
This is the Lenovo Smart Clock. It’s a touchscreen alarm clock powered by the Google Assistant
that packs tons of features in a compact design. Let’s crack open the box.
As you can see, it comes with the device itself and a bulky power adapter for its barrel power
plug. That means no USB-C or Micro, so you’ll have to bring the charger with you if you
want to move the thing. We’ll get to the design of the device right after this satisfying
plastic pull.
The Smart Clock has a four inch touchscreen surrounded by some chunky black bezels making
its face roughly the same size as a smartphone from a few years ago. It’s a bit shorter
than my white marble Pixel 3XL, but it certainly makes up for it in its extra volume. (onscreen:
please sponsor me Dbrand) It’s roughly three by four and a half inches on its face and
just over three inches deep, so it’s much more compact than other smart displays, but
IMO, a perfect size for a bedside clock. Rounding out the physical stuff, it comes in at 328
grams as far as weight, or roughly three quarters of a pound.
The material is a similar soft-touch felt mesh to Google’s products, especially the
Nest Mini and Google Home. It comes in gray, shown here, and darker gray, which they like
to call charcoal, but that one’s only available from Lenovo’s website.
As far as buttons and switches go, Lenovo keeps it simple with some very prominent plus
and minus buttons on the top to control volume. We’ll get to the sound quality in a second.
Aside from that, there’s a physical mute switch on the backside to mute the microphone
if you don't trust our Google overlords, which is right next to the barrel power plug and
a handy USB port for charging another device, like a phone or smartwatch, in my case.
Setting up the clock is super simple. Because it’s a Google Assistant device, you set
it up with the Google Home app, which means you don’t have to deal with any Lenovo bloatware,
which is definitely appreciated.
The specs aren’t that important, but we might as well cover them quickly. It’s a
four-inch 800 by 480p IPS touchscreen, which means it certainly isn’t the highest resolution
out there, and you don’t get the inky blacks of OLED, but it does have auto brightness
to adapt to the room. As for internals, it’s got one gig of RAM and eight gigs of flash
storage, powered by some random Mediatek 1.5ghz processor. Finally, it’s got one 3W Speaker
paired with two Passive Radiators for sound, connects to WiFi over 2.4 and 5 Gigahertz
networks, and packs Bluetooth 5.0 to boot.
Once you finish setting it up on your phone, you’re greeted with a massive clock, appropriate
for a smart clock, I suppose. It comes with a little tutorial of how to get around the
interface, which is thankfully fast, responsive, and super simple to use. Of course, this is
a Google Assistant device first and foremost, so it can be fully controlled through your
voice. It has all the features of any other Google Assistant device, like telling you
the weather, calendar appointments, jokes, Assistant apps, broadcasts, and more. It can
even make phone calls to any number for free. Of course, it also integrates with all your
smart home devices and services, as well as third party stuff like IFTTT. If you’ve
ever used a Google Home or even just the Assistant on your phone, you’ll feel right at home
here.
The touch interface is similarly familiar to use. From the clock, you can swipe once
from right to left to quickly view your upcoming alarms, and again to view the day’s weather
forecast. I used to also have access to my calendar and music, but, in typical Google
fashion, those screens seem to have gone the way of the Dodo, randomly disappearing for
some users (Lenovo Community). Anyways, swiping from the left edge of any screen will bring
you back from anywhere in the interface, until you get back to the clock. Here, you can swipe
down for some quick actions with one tap access to your alarms, your goodnight or goodmorning
Google Assistant routine or a nap timer (depending on the time of day), music, and a switch to
control your lights, like so.
To change the clock face, simply press and hold and you’ll be presented with a large
carousel of options, including digital and analog styles. You can even make a clock face
that displays custom images from Google Photos. Each of these faces can be further customized,
too, with a wide variety of playful colors, and there’s even an automatic dark mode
for lighter faces based on the brightness of the room.
Rounding out the touch interface, a swipe up from the bottom of the screen lets you
quickly control brightness and volume, toggle Do Not Disturb mode on and off, and dive into
the settings.
I suppose we should talk about alarms now, as they are a pretty important feature for
a clock. You can either add them directly with your voice, or swipe to the clock screen
like before. Here, you can toggle existing alarms on or off, create recurring alarms
for certain days of the week, change between a few preloaded sounds, enable sunrise mode,
which lights up the screen before the alarm in a feeble attempt to get you up in the morning,
and choose for it to toggle your good morning routine automatically, which could turn on
your lights and tell you the weather as soon as you wake up, for example.
Back on the home screen, when you have an alarm enabled, you’ll see an alarm icon
in the top right corner, and upcoming alarms will appear at the bottom of the screen, where
they can be quickly dismissed for the day with a simple tap if you wake up before your
alarm. When the alarm actually rings, by default the volume starts very low and gradually gets
louder. There’s a stop and snooze button on the screen; the snooze duration can be
changed in the settings. Oh, and probably its best feature which isn’t even advertised:
it’s smack activated. A simple smack on the top of the device (Lenovo calls this a
‘hard tap’) will either snooze or cancel your alarm, the choice is, once again, yours
in the settings.
But how do those alarms sound? Well, the speaker quality is.. fine. Definitely worse than the
full sized Google Home and even the Nest Mini. Unfortunately, this device doesn’t play
videos from YouTube or Netflix, unlike Lenovo’s larger Smart Screens, though it can show video
feeds from a security camera. You can play music to it of course, it works as an audio
Google Cast device that’s recognized by Spotify and many other services, although
getting the stream started can be a bit finicky. When streaming music, you get massive previous,
next, and play/pause buttons on the screen, so at least it’s easy to control. One awesome
feature is pairing it up with another Cast speaker, like a Google Home or even a Chromecast,
for much better, room-filling sound. You can do that in the Google Home app.
Alright, let’s get to price and my conclusion. The Lenovo Smart Clock officially retails
for $79.99, though it’s commonly on sale for only forty bucks--half that price. At
the time of writing, you can snag one at Best Buy for $49.99. At eighty, I’d be skeptical,
but at either of those lower prices, I’m very satisfied with the Smart Clock. It’s
got just enough of everything: Google Assistant smarts, a decent enough speaker, a compact
and good-looking design, a decent screen, and a feature you certainly couldn’t get
with just using an old smartphone or something: smack activation. If you ask me, it’s absolutely
worth the money, it’s literally what gets me up in the morning.
So that was my review of the Lenovo Smart Clock, thank you for watching. If you liked
the video, please hit that thumbs up and subscribe for more videos like this one. The link to
where you can buy this clock is down below, along with links to the gear I used to make
this video. Be sure to check them out as I am able to earn some affiliate revenue through
those links. And for the record, I purchased this clock from Best Buy and, as always, have
not been compensated in any way to make this video. The opinions here are entirely my own,
and I’d love to hear yours in the comments down below.