Lenovo’s Smart Frame puts your digital photos on a 21.9-inch canvas

Unlike some of the smaller digital photo frames, the Lenovo Smart Frame is quite large — it has a 21.9-inch screen — and is meant to be hung on a wall, like art in a gallery. In fact, when a few Engadget editors saw it for the first time in Lenovo’s demo room, we genuinely thought it was a random piece of art set up on an easel. It wasn’t until the image on the Smart Frame changed that we realized it was a digital frame.

That’s partly thanks to the anti-glare coating on the Smart Frame; it gives it a matte finish that’s more common with hung art than LCD screens. The Smart Frame has a 1,920 by 1,080 FHD resolution plus an 85-degree viewing angle, which certainly adds to its appeal. It also has an ambient light and color tone sensor, which adjusts the picture’s brightness and overall temperature according to the surrounding environment. This, according to Lenovo, makes for a more natural viewing experience.

One way to control the photos is via hand gestures. There’s a motion sensor at the front of the Smart Frame so that when you wave your hand from right to left, the picture changes. But the primary way to navigate photos on the Smart Frame is via a companion app. That’s also where you would load your photos via your cloud service of choice (Lenovo hasn’t announced yet which ones are compatible with it) and Lenovo’s built-in AI can choose the highest-quality images to display on the Smart Frame.

A Lenovo spokesperson said that there’ll be a collage feature that’ll automatically add multiple images to a single frame. There’s also a potential for a “look back” feature, to see photos that you took several years ago. And, if you consider the Smart Frame more as a digital art frame, the app also comes with hundreds of art pieces to choose from.

You could certainly display the Smart Frame in an easel like shown in the pictures here, but it’s really designed to be hung on a wall. Lenovo has therefore wisely included a snap-on mounting system with the Smart Frame. It consists of a circular mount — which has a built-in level and cord management grooves — that you attach to a wall. The Smart Frame has a similar circular disc on its back that pairs perfectly with that aforementioned mount.

It snaps on easily and securely, and it even lets you rotate the frame 90 degrees, so you can display images either vertically or horizontally. The one negative, however, is that even with the cord management system, the power cord is very visible against the wall. A Lenovo spokesperson said that you could potentially wire it through your home wiring, but that requires a lot more of an investment.

Interestingly, even though it’s only meant as a digital photo or art frame, the Smart Frame also comes with a couple of 2 watt speakers and a microphone. According to Lenovo, that makes it a little more future-proof. The speakers mean that it could potentially play short video clips, and the microphone provides potential for integration with, say, Amazon’s Alexa or Google Assistant.

For $400, you’ll get the base Smart Frame along with an included metallic outer frame. If you want a wooden frame — it’ll come in various wood finishes and styles — you’ll have to pay another $40 or so for each one. Thankfully, you can swap out the different frames quite easily with just a quick tug.

Along with the Smart Frame, Lenovo also announced a couple of other connected home products. One is the Lenovo Smart Tab M10 FHD Plus 2nd Gen with Google Assistant (starts at $189), which is essentially an upgraded version of the Smart Tab M8 it released last year. It’s a 10.3-inch Android tablet on its own, but when attached to a Smart Charging Station, it’ll display Google’s charging UI through its Ambient Mode experience. This essentially makes it a Google Assistant-activated screen. It has two Dolby Atmos speakers, and you can use it as a digital photo frame too.