Gadgetory

the new smart displays with Google assistant are here and this is the first one it's the little Nova smart display it's a Google home with a screen sure but it's something much more interesting than that it's basically a brand new operating system so here's a question what will Google do now that it has this brand new clean slate to work with so what you're looking at here is the 10-inch Lenovo smart display it's $249 and it has a really nice design it's got this bamboo on the back and a sort of a wedge shape it looks way better than the Amazon echo show you can also get $199 version that's 8 inches but it has a really boring grey plastic back honestly though I'd be happy to have this on my kitchen counter especially if it were standing up like this because it has little feet to do that but yeah you can see the software is not designed to work with it yet Google hasn't finished that the only thing that works in portrait mode is duo video calls anyway let's suss out the rest of the hardware here my favorite feature surprisingly is this little tiny switch right here which covers up the 5 megapixel camera now people can't drop in on you like they can on the echo show but being able to cover up the camera means I'm much more likely to put this thing in my bedroom or my bathroom I keep the Google home in my bathroom and it's great so come at me anyway the speaker is it's fine it's a 10 watt speaker with to passive tweeters and if you're hoping that this relatively big size means relatively big bass well sorry it sounds about the same as any other basic smart speaker it's nowhere near as good as a Sonos one or an Apple home pod a smart display can do everything that a Google home or a Google home Mini can do but the really important thing here is obviously the screen this thing runs on all new software called Android things which is technically based on Android but this is completely different now the core UI is still your voice but you can do stuff with the screen and the main thing you need to know there is swiping in from the left left edge serves as a back button it takes you home then to your photos and then ultimately to the ambient display now when you're on the home screen you can tap on the weather look at that and then there's a bunch of cards that basically serve to show you what you could do and what you can ask and you'll notice one of these cards is my personal calendar it does show personal information on this screen luckily when you set it up with your phone one of the little options on there tells you that if you don't want your personal information visible to everybody in your house you can just leave that off so one of the things that Google home can do that's great is it can recognize your voice and set reminders or show you your specific calendar stuff but it has to recognize your voice for it to do that and that doesn't always work here so far to just sort of speak weirdly hey Google remind me to buy cheese on the way home I couldn't verify your voice so I can't send any reminders hey Google what's next on my calendar your next event is called dinner it's today at 6:30 p.m. located in Rosa Mexicano hey Google video call Felicia making a video call to Felicia Sivakumar hey how's it going hey Google show me pictures of veer and pav ik showing your photos there is what a guy one of the big things to know about this platform is there's no apps per se there are some third-party integrations so for example here Spotify and there are a handful of other apps that can have stuff displayed on this screen but there's no app store and the touch UI here is pretty basic it's pretty basic but it's also pretty pretty in terms of how software design can look this is the clearest example of where I think Google is going since they didn't have to deal with any of the legacy crafts like they did on Android or Chrome Google is free to just make what it wanted to make and so what you end up with is fairly fluid animations really nice fonts good drop shadows it just looks great if you ask it a how-to question you might get a YouTube video instead of just like a web link so hey Google how do I darn a sock okay playing how-to darn sucks on YouTube now I'm a YouTube TV subscriber which means that I can just use the thing as a television by saying something like hey Google watch CNN all right here's CNN on YouTube TV and as soon as this place I'm just watching live television it also works with HBO now if you ask for a specific show what it doesn't have is Netflix or Hulu which is kind of a huge bummer but as long as you have a phone that has a cast button like this Android phone you can still cast off to it you put it all together and this thing makes a really great kitchen TV but it only comes into its own if you're fully bought into the Google ecosystem so for example I'm a Google Photos user and having Google photos in my kitchen on the displays really really nice it also makes video calls with Google duo which is also really good but not that many people use it basically I see this thing as a really good Google appliance which is I don't know fitting because it goes in your kitchen with other appliances oh hey one more thing it also makes regular old phone calls which is kind of a neat feature now my favorite feature of this thing might be recipes if you start a recipe it shows each step one by one it doesn't move to the next step till you ask for it and it stays on the screen it's really great and I hope that someday Google allows us to put our own personal recipes on the thing because right now just pull some recipes on the web actually that's a lie my very favorite feature this is super dumb but my very favorite feature is still timers because on this thing the timers stay on the screen the whole time you can even set multiple timers and they all stay on the screen it's not how the echo showed us it it's not how the home pod does it it's the most basic thing and Google actually got it right everything here is pretty simple it's clean and it's fast if you aren't put off by the price having a screen on a smart speaker is definitely better than not having one if you're already bought into an Amazon echo ecosystem should you switch to this thing yeah probably not but if you're using Google assistant I think this thing is great it's my favorite smart speaker with a display by a long mile even though I still hate hate saying a new rule compared to just saying Alexa more important to me I hope that Google expands this platform to work with more third-party software fairly soon maybe the most fascinating part of this smart display is that just by adding a screen to the Google assistant they've completely changed how the Google assistant answers questions so if you ask it how to do something you might get a YouTube video if you ask it for photos you might get your photos instead of something from the web if you ask it for a recipe you'll get a web page completely remade and two step-by-step instructions for you it's the culmination of everything Google has been trying to do a search making it give you answers instead of just sending you to webpages so what happens when Google actually does have a clean slate to work with turns out it makes our really great Google appliance hey everybody thanks so much for watching and I don't know if you've noticed but we're at a whole different space here we're gonna build out a set we've got this cool graphic behind us and also you should check out vox coms video on road diets i've been really into smart scooters lately and a road diet a really good way to make roads safe for those scooters so take a look at it