I unabashedly loved the first-gen Lenovo Smart Clock. It’s one of my favorite smart home gadgets, and I use it literally every day. Perhaps its only drawback was its relatively high launch price and cut-back features compared to a “normal” Assistant-powered smart display — admittedly, a requirement of the much smaller footprint. The new Lenovo Smart Clock 2 takes everything I loved about the original and tosses on a 10W Magsafe-compatible Qi wireless charger.

Lenovo Smart Clock 2

8.50 / 10

Read Reviews

Design, Hardware, what’s in the box

Lenovo loves to swaddle its smart displays in fun materials like bamboo and fabric. This unit uses the latter, with a heathered knit (gray, in our case) stretched over what I assume is a plastic body. The material is nearly identical to the original model, excluding shape. The bottom is made of a speckled gray plastic, flecked with tiny chips of subtly accenting color.

As a type of smart display, one of the most important features is the screen, and the one on the Lenovo Smart Clock 2 seems to match the original model, getting bright enough for indoor use, dim enough that it isn't annoying at night, and sharp enough that you can read content on it first thing in the morning. It also has features like automatic brightness you'd expect, though it can't do the snazzy ambient light color matching some other bigger and more expensive smart displays can, like the Nest Hub Max and Lenovo's Smart Display 7. (To my knowledge, no smart clock has that feature yet.)

On top, you have the volume up and down buttons. The back has a barrel connector for power and a hardware switch to disable the mic if you don’t want Google listening to any bedroom antics.

The USB Type-A port on the back of the older clock is gone, relocated to the new optional charging base. To slot into that, there is a new pogo pin connector on the bottom that rests neatly into the base. That base provides optional MagSafe-compatible wireless charging and a night light. It, like the plastic parts on the clock, has a speckled texture that should hide wear. Sadly, the base isn’t reversible to put the charging component on the left side, though that would have been a nice touch.

The 10W Qi charger is positioned under the target-like + sign on the base. Since it's MagSafe, it can hold recent iGadgets in place a little more firmly and securely — that may not be a boon to our mostly Android-using readers, but for those of you with late-model iPhones, it’s a nice touch.

While I did list a bunch of specs just above in a table, I have two important things to point out: One, hardware internals and the screen seem unchanged since the original 2019 model. That might seem to be a disadvantage — after all, newer is supposed to mean better and faster — but the specs also don’t matter as much in this product category. This isn’t a phone, so you don't have to worry about lag after subsequent updates, or increased hardware requirements. Smart displays don’t need a whole lot of oomph to do their thing. That said, I do still have a few complaints.

For one, I wish a new chipset had been used so that 5GHz Wi-Fi support could be added. I like keeping 2.4GHz devices to a minimum on my network, since those bands congest a whole lot more easily, and I have a lot of smart home crap. The more I can move to 5GHz, the better. Two, the screen on the Lenovo Smart Display 2 is fine, but part of me would love to see a more premium version that either squeezes in a slightly bigger display with a smaller bezel or which jumps to a different technology like OLED for those nighttime inky blacks — though I admit, I am reaching a bit, and the IPS display is perfectly adequate at night.

Contents in the box will vary based on what version you get. If you buy the display solo without the wireless charger, you’ll get that plus the power adapter and associated documentation. If you buy it in a package with the wireless charger, then you get that too (duh). I'm also pleased to see that the new wall wart is a lot smaller than the one on the old clock — it could get in the way on a surge protector/power strip.

Software and performance

Most of our readers are probably familiar with the idea of a smart display (and own one or two). If you don’t, it’s basically a digital assistant-connected smart speaker with… well, a display. What that means is you get the usual smart integration you’d expect on other platforms — Google’s Assistant, in this case — plus some extra visuals and touch controls. Those can be as mundane as a rotating gallery of photos or cover more interesting use cases like watching videos, setting alarms, reading recipes, and seeing results tied to your queries on the web. However, this “smart clock” category gets a cut-down version of that experience and some of the things you can do on a bigger screen you can’t do on a smaller one.

Some video-watching applications like Netflix won't see the Lenovo Smart Clock 2 as a target for casting, even though other Assistant-connected displays will show up, and you won't get the "full" smart display UI that Google gives to other devices with bigger screens. The "pages" navigation mode that shows things like Duo call access, content discovery, media options, and full smart home controls aren't present on these smaller-screen devices. The swipe left you'd use to access that simply takes you to a list of your alarms, though a simplified set of smart home controls is accessible via a swipe down from the top of the display, and voice controls still work.

That top menu is also where the night light feature lives. On the prior model, it illuminated the display, but this time it creates a glowing effect around the base of the clock — handy if you need a dim light to stave off sleepy stumbling on the way to the bathroom or something like that. You can configure a handful of settings related to it, and the way it works sounds awkward but is pretty useful in practice. In settings, you can set brightness for it and a timeout for it to stay on. After that, you can only ever turn it on via the top-menu shortcut; it turns off on its own. Sometimes that auto-off didn't feel like it kicked in correctly, though, and it would be nice if tapping it again in the menu turned it off manually.

You can also set custom night mode schedules, and I encourage anyone that puts a smart display in their bedroom to do that. Having a lower volume for night-time operation is pretty handy.

As far as voice-based commands go, you get the "full" Assistant experience and can trigger anything from this that you could from a Nest Mini or other speaker, including playing music, setting Nest Thermostat temperatures, asking for weather or news, configuring alarms or timers, and most other things you can think to ask. That last bit is kind of worth stressing: If you aren't already knee-deep in Nest speakers at home, the Assistant really can handle a wider variety of commands more intelligently than competing products like Siri or Alexa. It's far from perfect, and some of the integrations are buggy or frequently break (the Assistant is getting really bad at finding the right Spotify playlists from my own damn account), but it's the best option among the current selection, and I don't regret investing in the platform with my own smart home gadgets.

Functionality as an alarm clock — arguably, its primary purpose — is perfectly adequate. You set the time and it goes off, simple. On top of that, you can set things like a morning routine to be triggered, apply custom alarm sounds (including an AI-generated "impromptu" alarm), and configure which days it should repeat on, among other options. If you need to set alarms on the fly, they can be configured with a quick "Hey Google" or tapped out on the display. And when that alarm is going off in the morning, features like snooze work as you'd expect. Unlike the prior model, though, you can't just smack the top to snooze, which is a bummer.

Again, hardware isn't really a limiting factor with smart displays or clocks yet, so performance here is fine. Sometimes, like right after starting the clock, you might notice a little bit of lag, and it can drop frames, but this isn't a category with very extreme hardware requirements, and even though the chipset in this display dates back to 2017, it's capable enough for what little it needs to do.

Testing the wireless charger with a handful of Android devices and even an iPhone, I didn't run into any issues. However, there is one big benefit for iPhone owners: The charger is Magsafe-compatible and magnetically snaps your phone to the ideal spot for charging. You probably don't need to worry about an Android phone sliding off the charger in the middle of the night, but it's still a neat feature.

Should you buy it?

I’m a little different from the other folks at Android Police in that I love using a smart alarm clock. My original Lenovo Smart Clock is among my favorite gadgets and one of the few smart home purchases in the last few years that I’m 100% happy with. It makes a great gift, and I even plan on putting one in my guest bedroom. I stan this whole concept hard, so it’s not too surprising that I love the new Lenovo Smart Clock 2, too.

It's an extravagance and a product in search of a problem, I'll admit. But so is a heated bathroom floor, a hot tub, or a remote car starter if you live in a warmer climate. Sure, you don't need this, but it's pretty nice to just dump your phone on the charger, flump into bed at night, call out an alarm to Google, and fall asleep, all without looking at a screen. And if you have a bunch of smart home stuff like bedroom lights, it's very convenient to turn them off with your voice or a flick of a finger. Lenovo's Smart Clock 2 is the most luxurious way you can wake up in the morning.

I won't defend the practice of filling a home with smart gadgets. Service outages, security issues, and updates are all a concern that could see the whole "smart home" category turn into a short-term fad if and when we as a society really start to value sustainability. In the meantime, I love the Lenovo Smart Clock 2.