Lenovo Smart Clock: Google Assistant and Lenovo combine to make mornings easier

[MUSIC] This is the Lenovo smart clock. It's $80 and it's meant to fit neatly on your nightstand. It'll wake you up and give you a handy place to check the weather your commute and your calendar before you hop out of bed. It even has google assistant built in, so it responds to all of the same commands as the google home mini. In a sense, it's kind of like this google nest hub, it's a smart display that combines a touch screen with a smart speaker, but Lenovo already has one of those. It's this guy with a ten inch screen and all of the functionality of the Google Nest club. So you may be thinking honestly, what's the point of this. It's really just meant as a high tech alarm clock. The screen is small but ocused Again, what you can see is info you might need when you're going to bed or when you first wake up. But it loses a lot of what I like about Google's other smart displays. Like, it can't play videos. Or, scroll through pictures. Or open a smart home control panel, senior by restaurants, followed recipes, make video calls, this smart clock can't do any of those things. It can offer up shortcuts that changed throughout the day to prompt you to your good night routine when it's late or sep a nap time or if it's the middle of the day. And look at good smart clock it assumes it's next to your bedside so it doesn't have a camera to help with the privacy. You can customize clock faces, you can issue lots of voice commands. And you can control some nearby smart home devices with a touch. You can even set a sunrise alarm so the screen gradually gets brighter as you get closer to your wake up time. So it's not as robust as other smart displays, but that's okay. It doesn't cost as much. But how does it stack up to actual alarm Well, it's obviously more expensive than most, you can get a good alarm for 10 or 20 bucks, for a good one with a sunrise feature. Now we're talking more like 50 so we're in the same ballpark. Here you can customize news times, you can trigger your good morning routine with your alarm. You can smack the top to snooze It. Weirdly the sunrise light turns off when the alarm sounds. But overall it's a good one. It can even play music just like a smart speaker and it sounds pretty good for its size but it can't do one important thing for an old one. I played with a bunch of different clock faces and I couldn't find one that showed the time in a big enough font that I could see it without squinting in the middle of the night. Without still casting a glow that would keep me away. That sounds like a tricky balance but it's really not. Lots of alarms can do it even cheap ones. You just need big numbers in either red or orange. All in all the Lenovo smart clock is more expensive than a good alarm clock or a similarly sized smart speaker. It doesn't have as many features as a smart display. And you can often find the $130 Google nest hub on sale for a similar price. That's it. It's cute. It's customizable, it's helpful. It's a fun Smart Home novelty and it works well enough if you're trying to buy it.