What kind of smart assistant are you comfortable putting in your child’s room? Or, for that matter, are you looking for an uncomplicated clock-speaker combination? I have been using the Lenovo Smart Clock Essential for some time and this one has all the features you can ask from a simple but well-designed device.
This is not Lenovo’s first smart clock and the one that came before it was also quite good. What the company is selling as a smart clock has an assistant feature. Why do you need this over, say, an Amazon Echo Dot smart speaker?
First, the device comes with Alexa support. What you get is an electronic clock that can fetch all the information you want, like news headlines and weather reports. All you need to do is sync it with the Alexa app, which hardly takes a few minutes.
Second, and this is most impressive, the speaker is loud, really loud to fill the bedroom with music or the sound of an alarm going off. Though the device is small enough to fit on your palm, the speaker is worth every penny.
There is also docking support and Lenovo is selling a few of its own docks to go with it.
The feature I like most and is probably just something you will keep staring at is decibel count. The microphone can pick up the level of noise around you and continuously displays it below the clock.
It offers support for Amazon Alexa
For privacy, there is a button on the back of the device that can be toggled to switch off the microphone. This is particularly helpful for those who only want the machine to display the time and play music. The Amazon Alexa app can be used to stream music and I have added Apple Music as well as Spotify to the music list which the app can access.
There are two quibbles. First, the clock needs to be plugged into a power source while the neighbourhood I live in has power failures now and then, which means the alarm won’t go off if there is no electricity. Second, the power cable is white in colour while the review device is clay-red; I wish the colour on the wire matched that of the device.
Overall, it’s a fantastic device for the bedroom or even in the home workspace. Thanks to its audio quality, I will recommend the Lenovo Smart Clock Essential (Rs 4,999 but it’s available on Amazon for around Rs 4,100) any day over Amazon Echo Dot.