Lenovo Blames Google For The Delay In Firmware For Smart Displays Fix

For the last handful of months, owners of Lenovo Smart Displays had a problem preventing them from displaying anything but a blank screen. Lenovo has now confirmed that it's waiting on Google to fix that firmware issue. The first indications that something was wrong with the Smart Displays surfaced in April from users in Canada.

Those users saw frozen pages on the screens, and rebooting or reverting to factory defaults only temporarily fixed the issue. Eventually, users from the US, UK, France, and Vietnam all had the same issue. Currently, it's still unclear how many people the problem is impacting, but the issue affects owners of the Lenovo Smart Display and Smart Clock.

We do know that Lenovo shipped about 1.2 million Smart Clocks and about 650,000 Smart Displays. Google and Lenovo have reportedly been working to address the issue since June, but a fix is unavailable so far. Google's development team is reportedly at work on the issue. While many customers are raging at Lenovo, the company is pointing the finger at Google.

An official Lenovo spokesperson has said that Google deploys software updates for Lenovo's Smart Displays and Smart Clocks using Google Assistant. The statement notes that Google engineering teams are currently working to replicate the firmware issue identified by some owners of the devices so they can create a fix.

Lenovo is going so far as to tell impacted users to contact Google directly. There's currently no official statement from Google and no indication of when a fix might be available. The issue certainly seems to have hurt Lenovo's credibility in the market segment.