Google Home app hints at new Nest Hub clock faces

Abner Li | Mar 1 2021 - 6:50 pm PT

For the majority of their lives, Assistant Smart Displays have had eight clock faces. The last pair was introduced in May of 2019, while small tweaks were made last year. Google now looks to be adding new clock faces to the Nest Hub.

Update: These new clocks are now widely rolled out.

A Reddit user this evening has spotted at least three new “Fullscreen clocks” in the Google Home app (Device settings > Photo Frame). We see “Timeless” — available in Light or Dark — and “Weather.” These are actually the Photo Frame backgrounds found on the Lenovo Smart Clock, but optimized for bigger screens (7 inches and above). For example, Weather has been tweaked so that both temperature and condition appear below the time.

The small Lenovo Smart Display has six other options that are not on the Nest Hub — Playground, Weather, Clouds, Timeless, Modernist, and Mono — with each featuring a slew of more customizations, which can be set on-device.

According to the person that captured this screenshot, the new options do not yet work and selecting just results in the Art Gallery background being set. In announcing an Assistant Guest Mode at the start of this year, Google actually previewed Playground (as seen above) on a Nest Hub.

Adding new Nest Hub clock faces is an easy way for Google to meaningfully refresh the Smart Display experience following last fall’s big UI overhaul. They will likely first appear for units enrolled in the Preview Program (Device settings > Device information). Meanwhile, it comes as Google is also working on an interactive Weather Frog background that’s currently only available on Lenovo Smart Displays.