If you weren’t born before the 2000s, you may not be familiar with the traditional alarm clock that sits next to your bedside, especially since all the same functions can be found on a mobile these days anyway. You lose some features that the bigger products have and this product is designed as a bedside clock first and foremost.Share Image used with permission by copyright holder There’s no camera here, so no privacy concerns, making this a sensible product to place in your bedroom. This handy little bedside companion is a brilliant clock and fully-featured Google smart display all in one.įrom your bed you can see who’s at the door, talk to them or even use quick responses.

This certainly isn’t a device that you’d want to use for music, for this you would be better off with an alternative, such as the original Google Home. It’s perfect for alarms and the Google Assistant’s voice replies, but music sounds tinny and lacks punch. The Smart Clock has one 1.5-inch 3W speaker, which is loud enough but lacks bass and definition. In all other regards, the Google Assistant works in the same way on the Smart Clock as on other devices, responding in the same way to your voice commands.

Although I understand that the display wouldn’t give the best experience, the fact that the Smart Clock can handle video, as demonstrated by live camera streams, means there’s no reason why these features should have been removed. With the Smart Clock, you can’t view YouTube video, and you can’t cast BBC iPlayer from your smartphone both are options on the larger smart displays. Other video playback options have been removed, too. You get less information on the screen than with other smart displays and sometimes get a Google logo only Yes, the display is small, but surely it’s possible to display something? Likewise, ask a regular smart display about a subject (‘OK Google, tell me about Avengers’) and the voice response is enhanced with information on screen with the Smart Clock, you get voice only. Ask for recipes on the Smart Clock, and you get voice-only descriptions with an animated Google logo onscreen on a larger smart display, you get video. There are other cases where the full smart displays do a bit more. And, if you have a Nest Hello, you get alerts and can answer the door directly from your Smart Clock. Neatly, you can still view video streams from your smart cameras. Given the small screen these changes make sense and keep the Smart Clock efficient and focussed on its primary job. If you ask the Smart Clock to control your lights, the display lets you adjust brightness, but you don’t get the colour and temperature controls that the full Google Nest Hub gives you, nor can you can control thermostats with the display. You get fewer smart home controls on the Smart Clock than with other smart displays The body sticks out a little further (it’s 79mm deep) than a regular clock, but I didn’t find it hard to accommodate the clock on my bedside table. With its 4-inch screen, the Smart Clock is no larger than a regular digital clock. Lenovo has nailed this with the Smart Clock. The most important thing for a device that’s designed to sit on your bedside table is that it’s the right size.

Looks great and the screen dims automatically at night.

Just big enough to be useful small enough to fit on your bedside table.

Rather than shrinking down the interface for the existing smart displays, such as the Google Nest Hub, the Smart Clock runs a tweaked and updated operating system designed for the smaller screen, and to work well as an alarm clock first and foremost. It’s mostly succesful, too, ably replacing what you’ve got with a smart device. Rather than trying to introduce a new device to your home, it’s designed to replace your bedside clock. With the Lenovo Smart Clock, the approach is slightly different. Arguably, smart displays giver a fuller, more rounded experience than their voice-only counterparts, but they can be expensive, and then you have to try and find the right place to put them so that you can see the screen.

Lenovo smart alarm clock