Back when we reviewed the Lenovo Smart Clock, we wondered why it wasn’t as fully featured as Google’s Home Hub. Apparently now it is.
The whole “alarm clock” thing might be mostly dead, but Lenovo and Google have tried to revive it, launching the “smart clock” earlier in the year. Kind of like a smart display made smaller, the Lenovo Smart Clock brings a smaller speaker to the desk, kitchen counter, and night stand to provide a clock and a voice to Google, allowing you to control a smart assistant and set alarms.
But one of the things we’ve learned about a smart display and a smart clock is that they’re not always the same. In fact, back when we reviewed it, we found the Lenovo Smart Clock lacked some of the features that made the Lenovo Smart Display so useful, such as support for photos.
Essentially, if you thought you could replace both the picture frame and your alarm clock by your bed with one gadget, Lenovo had dashed your hopes.
Or it had, anyway, because Google is rolling out a change that fixes that.
From now onwards, the Lenovo Smart Clock is gaining support for some of the features that made the Lenovo Smart Display stand out, including that digital photo album thing we had hoped for at release.
As such, if you have one plugged in, you should have beyond the ten clock faces very shortly, making it more than just a clock with a smart assistant plugged in.
That’s something one of its competitors has achieved from the get-go, with the Amazon Echo Show 5 supporting clock faces and working as a digital photo frame from the moment you plugged it in. If anything, this update should definitely improve things on the Smart Clock.
Google has also said the update includes support for back-and-forth communication with the Google Assistant in English, at least to start with, thanks to a “Continued Conversation” setting that has been added, as well.
The update is rolling out now, which means we should probably dig the Lenovo Smart Clock back out and see if the whole thing has improved.
