Lenovo made a great tiny home hub and Alexa tablet
Lenovo made a great tiny home hub and Alexa tablet
2019-01-08
- Hey, we're at CES 2019,
where Lenovo just introduced
their new smart home products.
Now wait, I know smart
home products can be cringy
and not particularly interesting,
but these two might just be, okay.
We have a new new Google
Assistant Smart Clock,
and we have a new Echo Show device,
which also doubles as an Android tablet.
(chiming)
These are essentially Google Home Minis
with a display on them.
That's really what you're looking at.
Lenovo has co-designed these with Google,
and they're doing the
whole fabric-cover thing.
Lenovo told me that they're
doing the fabric cover
so you get the full sense that this
is a Google Home product.
So anything that you
can get from Google Home
or Google Home Mini, all
the voice activated stuff,
you get in this thing.
You get these two large, chunky
buttons for volume controls.
Some of the physical
features, you get a USB output
so you can charge your phone,
and there's a microphone switch.
The feature that is special and different
from Google Home Mini is
that it has a touch screen
on the front where you can set your alarm,
so you can look at things
like weather, and Google
and Lenovo have programed
a few routines into this.
Okay, Google, goodnight.
(smooth music)
And the lights go out.
And then in the morning,
you have a morning routine.
So you can say, okay,
Google, good morning.
- [Clock] Hi, Andrea.
- It doesn't seem to
care that I'm not Andrea.
Another option, if you have
a compatible Nest IQ Cam,
you can ask the smart clock
to take a look into that.
There's one active speaker up on the top,
and a couple of passive
radiators on the side.
And actually, if you just have it sitting
on a desk like this, the
sound is better from the back,
from the back of the alarm
clock, which sounds weird,
but, when you imagine, your
usual your alarm clock placement
is placed up against a wall,
and Lenovo has designed
it so the sound bounces
off the wall and back at you,
in front of the alarm clock.
I don't know that it's, necessarily,
the best sound you're ever going to get,
but then you don't get great sound
off the Google Home Mini, either.
The whole point of these
devices is convenience.
This thing also plugs into Chromecast.
There's a Bluetooth 5 chip in there,
so if you want to Chromecast
from this up to a better,
bigger speaker, you can.
There's a whole bunch of compatibility.
So I haven't, myself,
been especially enthused
about smart displays,
such as the one that Lenovo introduced
here at CES last year, but in
this sort of diminutive size,
and just this kind of
snippet-sized information
that you can get from this,
you get a lot of the Google
system functionality,
and it adds to what you can
get with a Google Chrome Mini.
The only thing that really bugs me,
is it's got this phone screen,
but it doesn't have the
best viewing angles.
The pricing is $79.99,
and this will be available
in the spring, 2019.
(upbeat music)
So Lenovo's other smart
home products, here at CES,
is the new Smart Tab, which
is a 10-inch Android tablet.
Now, Android tablets haven't had much
of a history of success, but
Lenovo's willing to remix,
and the idea is to give
you an Android tablet,
plus an Echo Show device,
which is what happens when
you dock it into this dock,
which is included with the tablet.
You get the Smart Tab P10,
which is the one docked down here,
and the Smart Tab M10, which is here,
the cheaper, $199, M10.
It has a more basic,
utilitarian finish on the back.
It has two Dolby Atmos
speakers at the top,
instead of four, as with the
P10 that's here, at $299.
But both of them have this
really quite nice display.
It's 1920 by 1200.
The Echo Show functionality
is pretty much what you get
on the Amazon Echo Show,
but the docking's also really quite nice.
I've listened to it, I've tested it out.
There's one 3-way speaker in the front,
one 3-way speaker on the back,
and then the two Dolby
Atmos speakers at the top,
and they all work in concert,
and they produce a really nice sound.
So both of these tablets
are running on Android 8.1,
a reload, Lenovo is not
promising by updates.
Just picking up the P10 out of it's dock.
It's fancy, it has a
7,000 mini amp battery,
versus the 4,800 mini
amp powering the M10.
It has the gloss finish in the back,
if you care for that kind of thing.
There's a fingerprint sensor
in the front down here,
with the P10.
It's a bit of extra convenience.
But honestly, the display's
the thing that is identical
between the two, and it's
the thing that I would care
about the most, frankly.
And aside from the display,
they also have the same processor.
They're both based on the
Qualcomm Snapdragon 450,
which, you know, it's
quite a low-end processor,
but in terms of responsiveness,
I have had no complaints, so fair enough.
You get a bit more RAM with this,
two or three gigabytes on the M10,
four gigabytes on the P10,
16 or 32 gigabytes of
storage with the M10,
up to 64 gigabytes of
storage with the P10.
Both charge wirelessly by
these pogo pins down here.
So this is all quite
promising, these smart tabs.
Both of them are available
to pre-order straightaway,
from Lenovo and from Amazon,
and you should be able
to get then in January.
For more videos like this,
and more smart devices for your home,
stay tuned to theverge.com
and youtube.com/verge.
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