Avocado toast is the hottest lunch trend to hit my apartment in years, and Lenovo just kicked it to a new level. After sticking Lenovo’s Smart Display in my kitchen this week, my snack of choice has only gotten better, and I couldn’t be happier. With the screen’s built-in recipe search and step-by-step guide to cooking, I learned that rubbing the bread with some cut garlic adds a lot of flavor, and finishing it off with a sprinkling of parsley, lime, and chopped tomatoes does wonders. I may even toss a fried egg on my green toast this week.

I could have looked up all these avocado toast recipes on my Android phone, but I never did. (I have no reasonable excuse, though I'm sure I could conjure up a lot of unreasonable excuses, and perhaps a diatribe about my family's bland dinners in the 1980s). The Smart Display simply makes following recipes easier and more interactive, letting you skip from step to step at your own pace. You can also get nutrition facts, which is helpful if you need to watch what you're eating.

The Smart Display is basically a stationary HD touchscreen with a Google Home speaker stuck to the left side. If you’ve ever seen an Amazon Echo Show, you know what to expect. It’s a conduit for Google Assistant, which can tell you the weather, answer questions, play music, and perform lots of other rudimentary tasks. You'll primarily interact with voice commands, but thanks to its screen, things get even more fun. Instead of hearing the weather, you can glance at it, and by asking questions or swiping around you can access new abilities that the screen brings, like adding items to a shopping list, displaying family photos, or controlling the smart devices in your house.


Pulling up food recipes is my favorite visual feature, but you can also make video calls by tilting the Display into the portrait orientation and calling up the Google Duo app. When you aren’t using the 5 megapixel (720p) camera for video chats, you don’t have to worry about it watching you, either. Lenovo included a built-in sliding cover, so you can physically block it when you aren’t making a call—something I think every camera-equipped device should have.

Under the hood, the Smart Display is powerful enough that you shouldn’t experience slowdowns. Lenovo packed in a Qualcomm Snapdragon 624 processor, 2GB of RAM, and 4GB of storage. With a device like this, you won’t need to think about most of those features or worry about it filling up. It should last a few years, at least, before feeling slow or losing access to new Google Assistant features—possibly longer.

Most every Google Home-compatible service or device should work on the Display, though oddly Netflix still doesn’t. YouTube is the easiest way to watch videos, but the Display also acts as a Chromecast, so you can stream video to it from apps like Hulu, HBO, Showtime, and CBS All Access from your phone without hassle. The same goes for music services like Spotify and Pandora.

As a streaming jukebox, Lenovo’s Smart Display is adequate, but not as crisp and finely-tuned as some of the best smart speakers, like the Sonos One and Google Home Max. It’s on par with Amazon’s Echo Show in audio, and sounds just fine, as long as you don’t crank the volume too high.

It also looks a lot classier than the Show, which is basically a big black box. The Smart Display comes in two sizes: 8-inch or 10-inch. In profile, both models look kind of like a premium white plastic tablet with a case propping them up. That tablet-like design and small touches like the bamboo back on the 10-inch model give it a fresh vibe. Like the Show, it would be nice if it had some kind of battery in it so you could move it around the house, and the screen really should tilt at different angles, but these aren't deal breakers.


As a service, Google Assistant is still a work in progress, and it’s not entirely ready for a screen yet. It’s strange that you can’t use the Smart Display in vertical orientation unless you’re making Google Duo calls, and it’s even weirder that you have to make those calls in a vertical view. It wouldn’t be hard for Google to support portrait and landscape orientations but it hasn’t yet, so you'll have to flip the Smart Display every time you want to make a video call.

Google also continually browbeats you into letting its software fully record your phone's location wherever you go along with other unnecessary tracking. Just know that Google Assistant on a stationary display does not need to track your phone’s location to work properly—you can say no to most of these features. The company still has a lot to learn about respecting its users’ privacy wishes in regard to Google Assistant.

Google is ahead of Amazon’s Alexa when it comes to handling multi-room, multi-device households, making it easy to set up speakers and devices, but it’s nowhere near perfect. Now that I have two Google-equipped speakers in my house (each on opposite ends of my humble abode), I routinely have to shut my bedroom door so they don’t both try to answer my verbal requests. Alexa is still better at figuring out which speaker you’re closer to, even if more than one of them hear you.

Lenovo’s pricing is competitive, which is a pleasant surprise given the high price of some of its recent gadgets, like the $400 Mirage Solo VR headset. The Smart Display starts at $200 for the 8-inch version, which is best for nightstands and kitchens with limited counter space. The 10-inch Display costs $250, and is best if you plan on using it as a secondary display for shows and movies.

If the idea of a Google Assistant speaker excites you, you really should consider one with a screen, and it's hard to imagine a better screen/speaker combination than the Lenovo Smart Display. It's a killer product for those who prefer to live the Google life, and it'll only get better as the voice assistant improves. Its reasonable price, attractive design, and promise of future software improvements all mean this is a device you won't be ashamed to have standing by, ready for the next time you feel like mixing it up with your avocado toast.