Plenty of people probably have an alarm clock like this by their bed or something similar,
and maybe a smart speaker like this lying around too,
or they're looking to get one. Now if only there was a way that you could merge the two?
Well now there is and it's called the Lenovo Smart Clock Essential! This is where new tech
meets old tech. However, is it the best of both worlds or the worst of both worlds?
Here i'm going to take you through an unboxing of it, go through how you go and set it up,
and give you a walkthrough of all the features and let you know whether i think it's worth buying.
Welcome to My Tech Gear, let's get into it!
So let's get straight into the unboxing
So in the box we've got an instruction manual
and we've got a power adapter and we've got
clock itself
Now that is the bottom. There's the top. That is dinky! like it's really stylish, i really
like that. It's not too big, about the size of your hand. 4" screen there, it's pretty nice.
Well let's go and set this puppy up.
So in order to set this up we're going to plug this in and we need to use the google home app,
so i've got my phone all ready to go. So we're just going to plug the power cable in.
[sound from speaker]
"Hi i'm your google assistant, to get started download the google home app on a phone or tablet"
So i've got the google home app on my phone so i'm just going to start that now.
So from the home screen you want to select 'set up google assistant speaker'. So we're just going to
go and tap on that, choose your home, hopefully not mine! it's now going to go and try and find
that device. It's found a speaker, which is the one that we've got here. So we want to click
on 'yes' and select your language. it's now connecting to the speaker, which can take a while.
and there it is connected! It asked if we heard the sound, which we just did coming
out of the speaker in the clock, so we click on 'yes'. You can help 'improve' if you want,
it's fine, and we're going to select 'the study', which is where we are at the moment. You can set
any room you like. Choose your wi-fi network. It's now going to connect the clock to your wi-fi
which can take a little while as well.
Now that's connected it's going to ask you a whole bunch of agreements. You can go and read through
them if you really want to. I've read through them a thousand times so i'm gonna click on 'next'.
It's asking me to select the language, so that'll do for now. You can set it to whichever one you
want. You can set up voice match. I'm not going to do that at the moment but you can go and do that
if you like. I've already got that set up. What voice match allows you to do is, if you go and
ask it a question, it will give you your emails or your playlist rather than someone else's,
which is quite handy, especially in a house where lots of people are using that speaker.
So just connecting to get that set up.
So that's it!
Here you can select your default music, so when you ask that speaker to go and play music
,you can say whether you want it to play off your Youtube Music or Spotify, or maybe something else.
I've already got it set to Spotify by default, so i'll leave it at that.
You can link video services to this as well if you like, so i could link say netflix or disney plus
if i wanted to. I'm not gonna do it for a clock, because it's a clock, but you could if you like.
This is the tv i've got in my lounge, so from my clock in my study or my bedroom
i could control my tv! You could add that if you wanted to. I'm not too sure how valuable it is!
We'll leave that on. So now it says we're almost finished it's just giving us a summary of things
we've selected before now, and the study speaker is all ready to go.
[sound from speaker] "Hi i'm your google assistant here to help
to learn a few things you can do continue in the google home app"
So there's a whole bunch of tests here. You can say 'that word', i'm not going to say it because
it's going to start all your smart speakers going off, to ask it some questions if you haven't done
that before. We're just going to finish set up, and there you go, there is your clock all set up!
So if we look at your buttons across the top here, we've got our volume down, volume up,
we've got our play or pause button, and we've got our alarm button here. So if
i press this it will show me an alarm. I set one up when i was off camera. If
i just leave that for about eight seconds it will go back to the main screen, there we go.
Around the back we've got a USB-A port so you can use that for charging your mobile phones,
and we've got a slider here for turning the mic off. Connectivity wise it's pretty good
too. It's got wi-fi 5, so that's your AC router or earlier. It's dual band 2.4 or five GHz,
and it's also got Bluetooth connectivity as well so you can connect a Bluetooth speaker to it,
which i'll go through in a second.
So if we have a look at the front of the screen this is a 4" screen.
Just for comparisons, here's a Samsung S20 FE. You don't need a large screen for
an alarm clock right? It's a good size to tell the time, that's really all you need.
Symbols here, you've got the day of the week across the top,
there's a symbol here to say whether you've got an alarm set, the weather's down here,
the current temperature is there, and that's the time. On the back, when you turn the mic off,
it has a little symbol here to tell you that the mic is off as well so that's pretty handy.
The front screen also has adaptive brightness
so when it gets near night time it will actually drop the brightness of that screen as well.
You can also tell it to drop that brightness as well manually by asking it.
Hey Google, set front screen brightness to 10.
[sound from speaker] "All right, setting the screen's brightness to 10 percent"
Hey Google, set screen brightness to 90 percent.
[sound from speaker] "Sure, setting the screen's brightness to 90 percent"
Also on the back we've got a night light so you can actually turn this on and off using the voice.
Hey Google, turn on the night light.
So that's it at the back, which is quite handy at night time.
Now you can ask it to turn it off by voice, or the minus button, which is the volume down
button here. You can turn it on and off just by holding down the volume button
which turns it off. If you want to change the brightness you can't use a button,
you have to ask it, similar to what we did for the front screen. So if we turn this back on
Hey Google, set night light brightness to 10 percent.
See it's on quite low now.
Hey Google, set night light brightness to 100.
So i don't know how well you would have picked that up on the camera
but it is quite a bit brighter than the 10 that it was before.
The speaker in this is a 1.5", 3 watt speaker, plus there's two mics here as well
for picking up your voice, which are across the front here. Quality wise the speaker is
okay. It's probably on par with a Nest Mini or an Echo Dot, but you're not really going to be having
a big huge massive party with this anyway. I would say the Nest Mini is probably a better sound, it's
definitely got more bass than this has, but if you look at what this is actually built for, which is
just playing background music in your bedroom by the side of your bed, or listening to podcasts,
it's perfectly fine. It does get quite loud as well, i'll play some music just to show you guys.
Hey Google, play some music.
[sound from speaker] "Playing some music on Spotify."
The music volume will be shown by the dots across the front as you go louder and softer. Another
cool feature of this is that you can actually pair it with a Bluetooth speaker. So i've got
a JBL Bluetooth speaker here, so i will just go and show you guys that working as well.
So in order to pair the Bluetooth speaker with the clock you will need the google home app.
So i've got the google home app on my phone again and i'm going to click on the study speaker,
and in the settings, if i scroll down there is a default music speaker. now it's currently set
to the study speaker which is the speaker that's on the clock, so i'm going to click on that and
there's an option here to go and pair with a bluetooth speaker. So if i just click on that
you can actually see it's found the JBL Charge 3, which is that speaker there. If i click on that,
you would have heard the dots and that means it's synced. So now if i click on 'done',
so now it should play music out of the Bluetooth speaker rather than out of the clock.
Hey Google, play some music.
[sound from speaker] "Playing some music on Spotify."
So it's now playing music out of here.
You can still control the music from the clock as well, so i can pause it from here. Pretty good!
So setting an alarm on this is actually pretty easy. You can use the buttons on the top but
honestly the easiest way to set an alarm is just ask google with your voice to do it.
Hey Google, set an alarm for 7 am every day.
[sound from speaker] "Every day at 7am, set"
So you can now tell the alarm is set because the icon is there on the clock.
If you do actually need to see them you can press the alarm button at the top
and it will show you that time. If you do need to delete it you can ask google to do that or
if you just short press the alarm button and the down volume button at the same time and
it will delete it. Now in a couple of seconds it's just going to go back to that main screen.
There's no alarms there, that's why it's gone blank. And there you have it,
that's pretty much the entire run-through of the Lenovo Smart Clock Essential.
Let me know in the comments down below what you thought of it.
So at the end of the day, do i recommend buying one of these? Well it's not without its issues,
and it's certainly a bit fiddly with some of the settings like how you can only change the
brightness of the night light or the front with your voice, and it's a little bit fiddly doing
bluetooth sharing and things like that so you've really got to know what you're doing,
and hopefully the in-depth run through that i've just taken you through will help you with that.
Having said that though, i love it! i think this is awesome! It's a really unobtrusive
clean way of getting a smart speaker and clock into your bedrooms without
having videos and cameras watching all the time and all that kind of stuff.
it can charge your phone as well which i think is really clean. when this first came out it was $50
and now it's only $25 at the moment, and that's a steal! I mean, the fact that
it automatically changes the time based on when you switch between daylight and winter
savings , i'd buy a clock for $25 just for that because i always forget to change the time!
so i think it's a great little buy as long as you use it for what you intend it for, which is a
bed-side companion. You're not going to run a party out of the speaker. It's great for
podcasts and music in the background, that kind of thing, so yeah, thoroughly recommend it!
i hope this video has helped you decide whether you think it's for you as well.
if you liked it please don't forget to like and share it.
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