Smart home devices have become essential for many, and taking advantage of the situation, Lenovo named its latest smart home clock something that sounds relatable to the situation. Yes, we are talking about the Lenovo Smart Clock Essential. Of course, the basic purpose of a clock is to show you time, but this one goes beyond that to provide a full suite of smart features. So, keeping its name in mind, is this smart clock really ‘Essential’ for you? Let’s have a look.
Design
The design of the Lenovo Smart Clock has been kept as minimal as possible. The clock is wrapped around with grey fabric which seems similar to Google Home Minis from Google. Then there’s a display on the front that shows basic information such as the time, date, day, and weather.
The four traditional Google Assistant dots light up when you ask the assistant to do something for you. Apart from that, there’s a night light at the very back of the clock. The light has a yellowish tint and is useful for those using the device as a bedside clock. There’s a Lenovo branding and four buttons on top including Volume up, down, play/pause music and a button for setting the alarm.
On the back of the Lenovo Smart Clock Essential, there’s a port for power input, a mute mic button so you can prevent the Google Assistant from listening to anything, and lastly, there’s a USB port on the back as well so you can charge other devices of yours by connecting a cable. And that’s it for the design.
The clock itself feels small sitting in front of you. The buttons have enough of a ‘click’ in them. And the fabric feels nice to the touch. You can click and hold the Alarm Clock button to set an alarm and if it should be recurring or only for a single day. There’s no shortage of customization available for the clock faces if you are into that.
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Performance, Features of Smart Clock Essential
The Lenovo Smart Clock Essential’s basic functionality besides showing you the time includes smart features. For handling these features, we get Google Assistant as we mentioned earlier. Everyone is familiar with Google Assistant’s support for a wide range of commands and this clock is no exception when it comes to what you can ask it to do.
One can ask the Assistant to tell them the weather forecast, ask it to play a song, turn on/off your Android TVs linked with the same account and much more. You can also ask the Assistant to set the brightness of the nighttime ring light we told you about earlier. And instead of using the set alarm button, you can directly ask the Assistant to set the alarm for you. One thing I enjoyed the most with the clock and like in general, with Google Assistant smart devices is the ability to make calls via Google Duo. Although it wasn’t that much of a treat on this one, I will tell you later.
Setting up the device was easy with the Google Home app. The App is available both on iOS and Android, so there are no worries regarding that. After setting up, the first thing I tried was to play music. Now, the sound quality from the speakers of the clock is average, but not the best. It can get loud enough for a room but not a hall.
You cannot expect a high amount of bass. Instead, the sound is more inclined towards lyric-focused, simply making it high on treble. I have owned a first-generation Google Home Mini as well, and in comparison to that, the Lenovo Smart Clock Essential sounded inferior. In addition, the voice was a bit high-pitched in my opinion.
Now, coming to the display. It has a sensor that dims the brightness at night when you turn off all the lights. Once you turn on all the lights, the display brightens up. It is bright enough in all scenarios with an adequate amount of clarity. Coming to the calls I talked about earlier, the dual microphone array isn’t very accurate in detecting your voice. I had to raise my voice to trigger the assistant while this problem wasn’t persistent in the Google Home Mini. The same issue persisted with Duo calls.