The 2024 iteration of the Moto G Stylus 5G borrows a great deal from the company’s more expensive Edge series phones, which is a welcome change. Gone is the 2023 model’s glossy plastic back panel, and in its place, you get a more friendly faux leather. It makes the phone grippy, and it stands out from other budget phones in a good way.

The back transitions smoothly into the raised camera bump, sporting a pair of sensors that I’ll get into later. It also tapers a bit toward the edge, meeting up with the phone’s plastic frame. While the phone looks nice, this is a reminder that we’re still in budget territory. The plastic edge picks up smudges and fingerprints, and while the material doesn’t feel very sturdy, the phone doesn’t flex or bend more than the average metal and glass flagship.

The display is a big upgrade for the Moto G line. The new G Stylus 5G sports a 6.7-inch 1080p pOLED panel with a 120Hz refresh rate. It has fantastic colors and contrast, but the brightness is just okay in my experience. It’s readable outside, but you might struggle to read text compared to slightly more premium devices. I also appreciate that the bezel is almost perfectly symmetrical around the display, even at the bottom. That helps make the phone look more expensive than it is, though it’s a shame we’re looking at an aging Gorilla Glass 3 panel on the display, which won’t provide a lot of protection from drops or scratches.

This device has stereo speakers, one earpiece, and one bottom-firing. The audio gets loud — much louder than previous Moto G phones we’ve tested. It sounds good up to just north of 50% volume, and then distortion begins creeping in. However, it should be fine for listening to podcasts or other spoken word content at high volume.

There’s no digitizer in the display like you’d find on a Samsung S Pen device, but that’s because Motorola’s stylus isn’t using inductive technology. There is, however, an optical fingerprint sensor under the screen—another first for the Moto G family. It’s a bit slower to unlock compared to the Motorola Edge phones, but the difference is minor.

The stylus lives inside a silo accessible from the bottom edge, opposite the headphone jack (yes, it still exists). It uses a push-push mechanism for easy removal, and the stylus itself actually looks and feels very similar to Samsung’s S Pen. However, the Moto G Stylus is just a standard capacitive nub instead of the inductive pressure-sensitive experience you get with Samsung.

The Motorola stylus is more precise than tapping with your finger, but it won’t be as good for writing and drawing as something that can register pressure. The Moto Notes app does a reasonably good job of inferring pressure from how much of the stylus nub is touching the screen, but the results aren’t perfect. In short, using the stylus doesn’t feel like writing with a pen in the same way that the S Pen and Apple Pencil do, but it’s worth remembering the phone only costs $400, which is less than a third of the Galaxy S24 Ultra’s price tag.

The Snapdragon 6 Gen 1 chip inside this phone is a few years old, but it’s still a capable Arm processor. It’s built on a 4nm process with four A78 cores and four A55 cores. In our testing, it ran day-to-day operations smoothly. High-end mobile games wouldn’t run very well, but simpler titles are within reach for the Snapdragon 6 Gen 1. The benchmark numbers are somewhat lower than phones running Snapdragon 8 and Google Tensor chips, but the Snapdragon 6 Gen 1 is very stable. Even when under sustained load, the performance doesn’t drop due to heat.

With a 5,000mAh battery, the Moto G Stylus 5G will have no trouble making it through the day. I regularly managed two days without trying, and even if the battery does drain faster than expected, this phone is quick to recharge. Motorola included support for 30W charging, which is much faster than the Pixel 8a’s 18W ceiling. There’s no charger in the box, but any 30W adapter with Power Delivery will do the trick — check out some recommendations from us. It’s even more unexpected to see 15W wireless charging in a budget phone (again more than the Pixel 8a’s 7.5W wireless charging).

The Moto G Stylus 5G comes with Android 14 out of the box and has three years of security updates. However, you’ll only get one OS update to Android 15 next year. That’s quite a poor update policy when you consider Samsung hits the four year mark with comparable phones, while the Pixel 8a is covered for a whopping seven years.

The interface is typical of Motorola, with clean looks, a passable implementation of Material You, and a handful of useful extras like a secure folder and gesture control — the “chop-chop” flashlight toggle continues to be one of the best reasons to use a Motorola phone. Oddly, the last vestiges of Peek Display appear to be gone in Android 14. Notifications now appear on the standard lock screen without the swiping controls of Peek Display.

Motorola does include a raft of pre-loaded apps, and while some of these add-ons are optional, the weather app is not. It’s essentially the 1Weather app from Swish Apps (an InMobi brand), and it’s a cluttered, sluggish mess. The InMobie privacy policy is also atrocious. This firm reserves the right to sell the data it collects to other companies, including your location. Because it’s bundled as the system weather app, most people are probably going to give the company permission to track them without even thinking about it. Swish apps have been on Moto G phones since last year, but this one seems to be burrowing even deeper into the OS — it’s also the weather provider for the lock screen widgets on the Moto G Stylus 5G.

Motorola phones are never top camera performers, but that’s easier to forgive in the budget camera phone space. The Moto G Stylus 5G takes the kind of photos you’d expect from a $400 device. You can get some solid results in bright outdoor lighting with the 50MP primary and 13MP ultrawide, but motion is hard to capture in any other setting due to longer exposure times.

Dynamic range and colors are passable — better than some of Motorola’s other budget devices. However, just $100 more gets you the Pixel 8a, which shoots much better photos and supports a huge variety of Pixel-exclusive photography features. To the point, Google’s phone picks up much more detail than the G Stylus, which tends to oversharpen and blur fine details. There were a few shots that looked good right after I pressed the shutter, but the processed versions I got a few seconds later were often much less pleasing to the eye.

I do appreciate that Motorola added macro support to the ultrawide lens rather than cramming in another 2MP dedicated macro shooter. The macro shots taken on this phone are actually good enough that it’s worth your time to take them. We have a Google Drive folder with the uncompressed images right here. Video support is a little less impressive, with 1080p at 60fps being the maximum resolution and frame rate. That means no 4K clips.

While the Moto G Stylus 5G probably isn’t going to wow anyone with its imaging, it does have a lot going for it overall. The display looks great, and performance is good for a mid-range phone that errs on the cheaper side. It’ll also run for a few days per charge, and the battery fills much faster than other phones in this price range. And there’s a stylus. Demand for that particular feature might not be widespread, but Motorola is alone in offering it for anything approaching a reasonable price. If you don’t think you’ll use the stylus, though, you’ll be better off with a different phone. And if you can afford another $100, the Pixel 8a is faster, has far superior cameras, AI-powered exclusive features, and will get updates for many more years.

• Google Pixel 8a ($499 at Amazon): While the Pixel 8a is $100 more expensive than the Moto G Stylus 5G (2024), you get a lot for your money. The Pixel is faster, has a better camera suite, a brighter screen, and it gets much longer update support. The only things you lose are faster charging and the stylus.
• Motorola Moto G Power 5G (2024) ($299.99 at Amazon): The Moto G Power 5G (2024) doesn’t have as many features as the G Stylus, and some of the specs are a step down, but it’s $100 cheaper and has a similar software experience. The display is still 120Hz, but it’s LCD instead of OLED. The MediaTek Dimensity 7020 processor might be slightly slower, too. And of course, there’s no stylus.
• Samsung Galaxy A35 5G ($400 at Samsung): The Samsung Galaxy A35 5G has the same $400 price tag as the Moto G Stylus 5G, but there’s no stylus. You do get a 6.6-inch Samsung OLED screen, better camera performance, and more durable materials like Gorilla Glass Victus Plus. It runs Android 14 with One UI 6.1, which is busier than Moto’s software but doesn’t have the sketchy bloatware.