Logic L66M Review: It’s cheap, but it should be cheaper

The Logic L66M is a very low cost, very simple smartphone. Not a smartphone to get you excited, but very much a smartphone to meet a specific budget.

Update: But not quite as cheap as I was originally told — it’s going to come to market at $179 instead.

Score: 2.5/5

In this review

Logic L66M Specifications
Logic L66M Design
Logic L66M Camera
Logic L66M Performance
Logic L66M Battery
Logic L66M Conclusion

The most notable aspect of the Logic L66M is its price.

At the $99 AUD price point it was originally pitched to me at, this is a cheap smartphone, though the fact that it’s now coming to market at $179 does rather work against that perception. Still, by “cheap”, I don’t specifically mean that as any kind of strike against it.

Cheap smartphones totally do have their place in the wider phone ecosystem; not everyone can afford a fancy flagship, and not everyone needs one either. For many people it’s about the basics at a basic price, but that does create some challenges when fairly assessing true budget phones.

Of course they’re not fancy, but you still want to get good value for your money even if you’re buying the “cheap” model. The Logic L66M isn’t terrible for what it is, but it will pay to be aware of its limitations and your other options before diving in.

Design

The Logic L66M is built around a simple 6.6 inch display with a teardrop style notch, a style you really don’t see too often these days outside the budget space that it very much occupies. It is, as you’d expect at this price point an entirely plastic body phone, though the grey metallic finish might fools somebody for a few seconds in this regard.

Around the back you’ll find dual lenses – more on that shortly – as well as a fingerprint reader, another pointer to a design style that really doesn’t get used much any more at all. Most phones that don’t offer up in-display fingerprint readers (and I wouldn’t expect one at this price) tend to have a combination power button and fingerprint reader.

Instead, the power button gets to be its own entire creature, sitting on the left hand side underneath standard volume buttons. The right hand side of the Logic L66M houses its combination dual Nano SIM card and micro SD card slot.

It’s nice to see them split, so you can have two SIMs and storage expansion, though the microSD card slot will take a maximum of 128GB of expansion storage, no more. It’s also equipped with a standard 3.5mm headphone jack if you like your music wired.

None of this is fancy, but that’s not the point. The point, once again, is that this is a low cost smartphone. It’s not super stylish, it’s not notably robust either. You do get a simple clear plastic case in the box, and while it’s not going to do much against extreme force, I’d still suggest that you drop it onto the Logic L66M pronto. If that’s not to your style, I was surprised to discover a PU Leather (AKA “Vegan Leather”, AKA “Plastic”) style case on Amazon if you did want to style it up.

Camera

Camera quality is the number one area where budget phones tend to struggle. That’s not a contentious opinion, it’s a matter of fact.

The Logic L66M has two lenses on the back, but you’ll only shoot with one of them; a primary wide 13MP sensor paired up with a VGA sensor used for focusing. The teardrop at the front houses a simple 5MP selfie camera. None of this is exciting, but again it’s built to a price point, so exciting isn’t what you’re going to get.

What you’re going to get is slow. Quite slow in fact, whether it’s launching the camera app, focusing on your subject or taking shots. Quality is mediocre at best, but again I’m not entirely surprised by that.

With only a single usable lens at the back, you’re limited in shot types, with a maximum of 4x digital zoom at play. Here’s an example of that at a nearby fountain.

Here’s the standard shot taken with the Logic L66M:

And here’s the 4x zoom shot:

While again I do have to point out its price point, and the expectations you should have around that, I also do have to say that the camera is easily the most frustrating aspect of using the Logic L66M. I can wait for apps to load slowly, but I can’t recapture photographic moments if they’ve already passed me by.

To give an example of that, here’s a reasonable-ish shot of one of my cats, taken with the Logic L66M.

Which while not great – the room wasn’t really as dark as this shot might suggest – does rather skip past the fact that I had to take about half a dozen shots around it to get one that wasn’t a focus blur mess.

Logic L66M Sample Photos

Performance

The Logic L66M is built around a Unisoc 9863A (AKA Unisoc T310) CPU, a processor that is neither all that new or all that fast – but again, we’re in budget phone territory, so this is to be expected. It’s paired with 4GB of internal RAM (plus 4GB of virtual RAM) and 128GB of onboard storage, running on Android 13.

There’s no detail as to software updates in the future, but I wouldn’t be holding your breath; the unit I tested only had the January 2024 security updates applied. That again is par for the course with lower cost phones, though it’s not exactly desirable.

There’s always a question of tempering your performance expectations when dealing with cheaper handsets. You just can’t expect rocket performance out of a phone in this price bracket… but even then, the Logic L66M can’t be described as anything but slow.

To give that some context, while it’s tricky at this price point to find too many phones that’ll provide enough power to have their CPUs tested, here’s how the Logic L66M managed on Geekbench 6’s CPU test:

The issue here is that at $179, The Motorola Moto G04 is essentially identically priced to the Logic L66M. I could never call the Moto fast, but comparatively, it absolutely is. The Logic L66M is nearly always slow, and it’s a little surprising to me that they didn’t opt for Android Go on board to try to make the most of its meagre resources.

It doesn’t fare any better when looking at GPU performance either:

While I don’t really think too many of the Logic L66M's potential buyers sit up at night wondering about GPU scores all that often, the issue here is that the slow performance of both CPU and GPU here do affect real world app performance.

Patience is key here, as you’ll hit lag often, whether it’s within individual apps or when switching between them. I hit it most noticeably launching the camera app if I wanted to take a quick snapshot.

One of the core appeals for the Logic L66M at the time of publication is that it’s a fully 4G compliant phone in a market that’s just about to see the death of 3G networks – and it even bears a sticker to that effect on the box, which is not subtle, but then that’s the point. 4G reception and speeds were fair in suburban Sydney if you just wanted a phone for making calls.

One feature that isn’t present on the Logic L66M – though again it’s a rarity at this end of the pricing pool – is NFC for contactless payments. You can tell that the Logic L66M was originally built for an Asian market audience, actually, because while it lacks NFC, there’s a direct toggle for QR code reading in the phone’s notification blind, because that’s a very prominent payment system in that part of the world. If your 3G upgrade plans also need NFC for your contactless payments, you’ll be left wanting by the Logic L66M.

Battery

Logic proudly boasts of the Logic L66M’s “BIG BATTERY”, with a capacity of 5,000mAh, which on the surface does sound like a big number. Combine that with the slower processor on board, and there’s scope here for some impressive battery life, right?

Well… not so fast. I’ve said it before and I’ll no doubt say it again, but battery capacity is not an automatic indicator of battery life, even if having a smaller battery rarely helps. A lot of budget phones do tend to struggle with good power management, and the Logic L66M does rather fall into this category, although not quite as badly as some lower cost units I’ve tested over the years.

To test this out, I ran the Logica L66M through my standard YouTube battery test, streaming a 720p video (the maximum resolution it would support) for an hour from a fully charged battery. This test gives me both a comparative picture of performance against other phones, but also a likely indicator of whether a phone is likely to last through a full days’ moderate usage.

Phones that drop below 90% in this test are in that hazard zone, and the lower it is, the more it’s an issue.

Here’s how the Logic L66M compared against similarly priced competitors.

That’s not a great score for the Logic L66M, though it’s only just below my typical 90% threshold. That indicates that you’d have to carefully use the Logic L66M through a day’s usage if you did want it to last the distance, and my own ad-hoc testing does concur with that.

Throw more CPU intensive apps at it and you’ll be reaching for the charger (which, nicely, is included) before too long. It does at least take power over USB-C, signalling that the days of microUSB charging on budget phones are now finally behind us.

Logic L66M: Alex’s Verdict

Will I personally be replacing my standard daily smartphone with the Logic L66M? No, I won’t; I found the camera to be particularly slow and annoying, but then I’m fussy that way and I have the luxury of choice here.

I totally get that there’s a significant segment of the population who does not have that choice for basic financial reasons. If that’s you – or you simply don’t want to spend much on a phone – then the Logic L66M will cover your basic needs in a very basic way, though there are better options available at this price point -- and quite a few more if your budget can stretch just a little bit higher, too.

Logic L66M: Pricing and availability

The Logic L66M retails in Australia for $179 outright.

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