Lenovo announced on Sunday that it would release its own smart TV that will run on Google's Ice Cream Sandwich operating system. The planned smart TV is Lenovo's first attempt at making television sets.

Lenovo's smart TV, called K91 Smart TV will recognize voice commands and run Android 4.0 applications. While other Google partners like LG and Samsung opted to manufacture television sets with Google TV, Lenovo instead decided on differentiating itself from the pack and went with the first TV to run Google's latest operating system: the Ice Cream Sandwich.

The K91 Smart TV is a 55-inch HD TV set with a 1080p IPS display, a 1.5 Ghz Qualcomm dual-core processor, 1Gb RAM and a built-in 5 megapixel camera for face recognition technology and advanced parental control. The K91 will also run a completely custom skin for Android that Lenovo calls "the Sandwich UI". The TV will be controllable through voice recognition and will be completely compatible with a tablet or smartphone so consumers can access their favorite songs and videos using Lenovo's cloud support. Users can access to thousands of apps from the Android Market, streaming video services and regular TV programming with the K91. The K91 will only be initially available in China at the end of the first quarter of the year but Lenovo is looking to release it internationally.

"This allows the user to tell the remote control what they want to do, such as accessing thousands of TV apps available running on Android 4.0, or accessing LenovoCloud service to download new upgrades, and also access personal multimedia content or interact on social networks," Nick Reynolds, director at Lenovo told Computer World.

Lenovo's early entrance in the smart TV market will give it an edge over Apple Inc. which is rumored to be developing its own smart TV running on Apple's iOS operating system. Apple already has an Apple TV set-top box to stream videos and other content. Lenovo is also introducing the A30 Internet TV set top box for streaming services, access to cloud-based games, karaoke and other content.