Lenovo Smart Clock

• The Lenovo Smart Clock is priced at $79.99 (Rs. 5,634 approx.) and it will be available from spring 2019.
• FOR TECH COMPANIES, it’s not enough that many of us now fall asleep with our smartphones next to us, then reach to grab our phones yet again immediately after opening our eyes. They want us to have as many touchpoints in our lives as possible, an infinite number of ways in which we might interact with their products and services. So now they’re coming for our bedsides.
• Lenovo’s Smart Clock is one of a few examples of this, along with Google’s Home Hub, Amazon’s new Echo Show 5, and the two-year-old Echo Spot. All of these products are small enough to live on a bedside table, just inches from where you lay your head at night. The companies say these little devices with screens could go anywhere; on a kitchen counter, in your home office. But they lend themselves particularly well to the space that exists between slumber and stumbling into the shower each morning. They show you your calendar, tell you the weather, play snippets of news, and, oh yes, blare loud noises into your brain if that’s what gets you going in the morning.

• The Smart Clock doesn’t actually do anything a Google Home Mini can’t, but it’s a much better bedside companion. It’s not just that it has a screen. Lenovo has carefully considered the ways in which you will use the Smart Clock to emphasize features that aren’t as prominent on other smart speakers. For example, if your Wi-Fi goes out, it’ll still display the clock rather than the an error screen.
• For one, it doesn’t have a camera. Lenovo understands that the majority of Smart Clocks will be placed in a bedroom, so rather than implement a set of switches and toggles to turn it off, it simply eliminated the risk altogether. The lack of a camera might be a deal-breaker for some, but I’m willing to bet most people will buy it because it doesn’t have a camera rather than despite it.
• But the best feature of the Smart Clock is a simple one: alarms. They’re always a tap or a swipe away, but like any other Assistant device, you’ll mostly set them by asking. Like the Sunrise feature on Pixel phones, alarms start off low and gradually increase in volume, so as to not jerk you out of a deep sleep. The speaker is surprisingly good too, so it’s a bummer that you can only set it to play one of six preset tones rather than a song or station.
• It’s been so long since I used an alarm clock with actual buttons that I hadn’t quite realized how much of an annoyance snoozing has become on smartphones and smart speakers. On the Smart Clock, you can tap anywhere on the screen to snooze rather than struggle to tap a small smartphone target or hope it can understand your groggy mumbles. And there’s a setting to adjust the length of snooze time, too: a small but welcome addition. There’s even a Nap Timer, which starts a 20-minute timer for a quick stretch of shuteye.

A semi-smart display

• For as good as it is at alarms, however the Smart Clock isn’t as great at being a smart display. While it dutifully does the things a smart speaker should—home control, general knowledge questions, music playback, etc.—it doesn’t take advantage of its screen beyond showing the time. So you don’t get maps, song lyrics, or the Smart Dashboard on the Google Nest Hub.

• The biggest deficiency is that it can’t display photos. While its screen is a good deal smaller than the Google Nest Hub or even most smartphones, it’s still plenty large enough for photos, especially when the 2.5-inch circular Echo Spot manages to do it. Google Photos integration should be a tap and a toggle away. Alas, it remains out of reach.
• You also can’t watch videos on the Smart Clock. While it connects with a Chromecast to beam things that Assistant finds, it can’t actually show them on its tiny screen. That means if you put a Smart Clock in your kitchen, you won’t be able to use it to view recipes. Instead, Assistant will read you the steps like it would on a Google Home, but all the speaker will show is the colored circles logo. It’s a bummer since the Smart Clock display is the perfect size for a countertop.