Lenovo Smart Frame is a 21-inch display that shows art on your wall

Ben Schoon | Jan 6 2020 - 11:31 am PT

Perhaps the best part of a smart display is the ability to show pictures automatically from online storage sources. With Lenovo’s new Smart Frame, you’ll be able to display pictures on your wall with essentially a small TV.

The Lenovo Smart Frame is a 21-inch display (1080 p) meant to be mounted up on your wall. It doesn’t have Google Assistant, doesn’t listen for hotwords, and can’t play music or videos from YouTube and other services. Instead, the device is designed simply to show off your photos in your home.

Unfortunately, the Smart Frame also doesn’t work like a Nest Hub or Lenovo’s smart displays with pulling images from Google Photos. Instead, the product uses an app to put whatever photos you want up on the display. That app can also display “hundreds of art pieces.”

Lenovo uses AI to filter out the best shots to be displayed on the frame as well as showing those photos in a smart way. There’s also a light sensor that adjusts the brightness of a photo based on the ambient light in the room.

The Lenovo Smart Frame’s built-in AI curates your photo album by choosing the highest-quality images from your collection and then automatically composing them into digital collages to maximize the number of images viewed at once. The Lenovo Smart Frame also comes with a free app that comes with hundreds of art pieces that can be displayed throughout your home.

As mentioned, the Smart Frame is designed to be mounted on a wall. With that in mind, there’s a “snap-on mounting system” that Lenovo says will make it easy to get the Frame up on the wall, including better cable management for the power cord. That system also allows the Frame to be switched between portrait and landscape orientation.

Rounding out the package, Lenovo has a selection of different frame colors available. In select cases, users can also have the time and weather displayed on top of photos. There’s also a microphone and speaker on the Smart Frame, but we’re not sure what they’re used for. Stay tuned for our hands-on coverage for more on that.

The Lenovo Smart Frame arrives in August of this year for $399 in North America.