Today at CES 2018, Lenovo took the wraps off its new Smart Display. It’s essentially a competitor to Amazon’s Echo Show in which it comes with a digital assistant for performing commands and has a touchscreen for viewing information. What’s interesting is the fact that Lenovo partnered with Google to bring the Google Assistant to this smart home hub, a first for a smart speaker with a display on board.
The Smart Display comes in two sizes: 8-inches and 10.1-inches. The former has a resolution of 1280×800 and the latter has a 1920×1200 resolution. Other than these differences, they both pack the same feature set. There’s a 2-inch 10W full range speaker with a Dual Passive Radiator, four microphones, 2GB of memory, 4GB of storage, and the Qualcomm Home Hub Platform based on the Snapdragon 624 system-on-a-chip. The Smart Display can be placed vertically or horizontally based on your preferences and arrives in a soft gray or bamboo finish to match your home’s decor.
With the Smart Display, you can do normal things like check the weather, view your calendar appointments, watch YouTube videos (take that, Echo Show), check traffic conditions, and even look up recipes all by just saying “Hey, Google.” Basically, anything you can already do with a Google Home, you can do it with Lenovo’s Smart Display. Integration with Nest smart home accessories is also present so you can control things like your lights with your voice.
When you’re not using the device, it’ll act as a digital photo frame for pictures uploaded to Google Photos or a designated background image of your choice.
Finally, the Smart Display comes with a webcam for making video calls to your friends via Google Duo. This means you can place a video call on the Smart Display and answer it on a phone. It’s sort of like how Amazon’s video calling works on the Echo but by Google and Lenovo.
Lenovo says the Smart Display will go on sale early this summer (around July) starting at $199 and going up to $249 for the larger screen. We’ll let you know when it launches and if we can get our hands on a unit.
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