Lenovo Smart Clock first look: Google Assistant for your bedside table

Lenovo Smart Clock hands-on: Want Google Assistant in your bedroom? This might be the perfect product

A year after Google first introduced its Smart Displays it’s partnering with Lenovo again to shrink them down and make them perfect for your bedside table.

Lenovo Smart Clock price and release date

In the US the Smart Clock will launch later in 2019 for $79. No UK price or release date is known currently. 

Related: CES 2019

The Lenovo Smart Clock, as the name suggests, is a clever alarm clock that builds in Google’s AI Assistant. It’s designed to sit on your bedside table, wake you up and give you glanceable information like news, weather and calendar appointments.

Visually it looks a lot like the Google Home Hub and Google Home Mini, complete with a grey fabric body and a soft finish. This might have been made by Lenovo, but it feels and looks very much like a Google product and that’s far from a bad thing. I can see this easily sitting on most people’s bedside tables and it doesn’t have an overly ‘techie’ look.

On the back you’ll find a USB port for charging your phone, a toggle for quickly disabling the mics and there’s volume up and down buttons on the top for easy access. Like the Home Hub, there’s no camera here – something that would likely have put some off placing it by their beds.

The one slight disappoint that stood out during my time with the Smart Clock was the 4-inch display. Get up close and it looks fine, but look at an angle and it appears washed out. I’ll have to spend more time with the device to see whether this makes it hard to see the time when you’re not looking directly at it.

New here is a smart alarm feature that can wake you up with light and a few built-in routines that’ll command Google Assistant-compatible products to ease you into the day. You’ve also got a built-in speaker that, to be honest, sounds OK considering the size. Don’t expect this to replace your Sonos or even a Bluetooth speaker, but if you want to listen to podcasts in bed or wake you up with some music, it should be perfectly adequate.

The basic UI is exactly what you want on a bedside table. You can easily set an alarm and switch between various clock faces. You can, of course, ask the Assistant questions and it’ll relay the answers through the speaker. It’s all simple, intuitive and requires very little interaction to get things done.

Google’s done a fantastic job of improving the OS on these Smart Displays since they first launched and they can be a massive help if you’ve filled your house with smart bulbs, connected cameras and the like. You can quickly turn all your lights off either with a simple ‘Hey Google’ voice command or a swipe down on the display and if you’ve got a Nest camera it’ll direct the feed right to the screen.

First impressions

The Smart Clock is a dinky and affordable hub for your smart home gadgets that also happens to be an alarm clock. I was immediately taken with the design and having Google Assistant Routines in a device as unobtrusive as this just makes so much sense.

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