Lenovo Smart Clock weather makes a surprise return

Change can be hard for smart homes. While we love getting new features that make our smart home hardware better, far too often we hear about manufacturers abandoning old products, turning off necessary cloud infrastructure and leaving them worthless. Even when they don’t break something entirely, sometimes old functionality just up and vanishes — like we learned about last month with the Lenovo Smart Clock Essential. Thankfully, today we have some good news to share for a change.

Lenovo’s Smart Clocks are a lot more restrained than a full-featured smart home display like a Nest Hub, and the display on the Lenovo Smart Clock Essential focused on just showing you the time — and the weather. But this past summer, users started noticing that the weather was disappearing from their Smart Clocks, leaving only the time behind.

While we reached out to Lenovo at the time to inquire about what was happening here, we never did hear back with confirmation of what was causing the weather to vanish, nor learn anything about plans for a fix. We still don’t know what actually happened behind the scenes, but this week Smart Clock Essential owners are starting to report that their weather has returned.

Over in our post first sharing news of the problem, reader ignacy.drab posts today that they just got their weather back overnight. And looking at some of the Reddit threads where we saw the issue reported, we see multiple other users confirming that weather is back for them within the past day.

It might be nice to learn what actually happened here — and we’ll continue to keep an eye out for Lenovo sharing anything — but right now we’re just happy to learn that the Smart Clock Essential is going to keep on ticking (and showing the weather). Now if Lenovo would only get around to restoring light control on its other Smart Clock…