Connected alarm clock goes live with wallet-friendly price tag
Lenovo has announced a stripped back, budget friendly, bedside based smart speaker – the Lenovo Smart Clock Essential.
Building on the success of – and looking a heck of a lot like last year’s Lenovo Smart Clock – the clue is in the name with the Essential.
It’s not a Google Smart Display like its feature-rich predecessor, but is instead a basic Google Assistant smart speaker with an LED display on the front, giving you the time, the date and the weather and temperature.
Obviously, with the Google Assistant built in, you can use it as you would any other Google Home smart speaker – controlling your smart home devices, triggering automations, setting reminders, checking your calendar and the like.
The real bonus of having the voice assistant on board is that it will also be super simple to set alarms for your morning call. You could choose to be woken up with news, music or the radio and you can even pair your alarm with playlists, smart lights or even brew the morning coffee.
The Lenovo Smart Clock Essential lets you customize the display and have the brightness increase gradually as the sun comes up. It features a snooze button on top and a USB port on the back for charging your phone overnight. There’s also a handy night light on the rear, as well.
You wouldn’t want to use the 3W 1.5-inch speaker for anything beyond casual audio playback but we did find that the same size speaker in the old Lenovo Smart Clock was pretty punchy for its size.
The Lenovo Smart Clock Essential will cost £49.99 when it goes on sale in September.