Motorola Moto G Stylus (2022) Smartphone Review
Don’t let the bargain price fool you. This phone has a lot to offer, even if you don’t want to write on it a stylus.
By Melanie Pinola
Budget phones are on the rise. Apple, Google, and Samsung all introduced models this year that cost around $450 and do everything most people want a phone to do, such as taking clear, Instagrammable photos and running for at least a day on a single charge. These new models should be welcome for many people shopping for a new cellphone, especially given today’s high inflation.
Add the Moto G Stylus to the list of low-priced phones for your consideration. After using the phone for a few days, here’s the TL;DR version of my review: I can’t believe this phone costs so little for what you get.
You can grab a non-5G version for just $200 or the 5G variant for about $350. The Moto G Stylus 5G has more storage and memory than the less expensive phone: 256GB of storage and 8GB of RAM versus 128GB of storage and 6GB of RAM, respectively.
Whichever version you choose, the Moto G Stylus has features not found in most pricier phones. There’s the built-in stylus, of course, which is useful for anything from quickly jotting down notes to creating digital drawings. Beyond that, you get a jumbo 6.8-inch display and a microSD card slot, which is a rarity in phones these days.
CR testers give the Moto G Stylus 5G a high overall score, citing its impressive display, performance, and durability. However, its still image and video quality, sound quality, and battery life ratings are just so-so compared with other models. The phone lasted 32.5 hours on one charge in our testing.
I tried out the Moto G Stylus (2022) non-5G model, which is very similar.
Motorola Moto G Stylus 5G
Notable Features
Built-in stylus: The stylus is one of the phone’s standout features. After all, it’s in the name. The Moto G Stylus is the most affordable way to use your phone as a notepad replacement or to doodle on your phone more precisely than you can with your finger. In the U.S., Samsung is the only other major option for stylus-enabled smartphones, with the Galaxy S22 Ultra starting at a steep $1,100.
Large display: This phone features a giant 6.8-inch screen. It’s an LCD screen rather than the more advanced OLED screens found in premium phones, but the high-definition 1080p resolution is crisp enough to read tiny text and the colors on the display look vibrant.
Fast refresh rate: While other budget phones, including the iPhone SE and Pixel 6a, have a 60-hertz refresh rate, Motorola’s given the Moto G Stylus a 90Hz refresh rate for the non-5G model and a 120Hz refresh rate for the 5G version. That makes for smoother animations when swiping through menus and when playing games.
Multiple cameras: On the back, the Moto G Stylus has a 50-megapixel rear camera, an 8-megapixel ultrawide lens, and 2-megapixel depth sensor, which aids the main camera for tasks like creating a bokeh background in portrait photos. It also has a 16-megapixel front or selfie camera. Those are premium cameras specs. Other budget phones, including the iPhone SE, have only a single rear camera.
Extras: Some people might buy this phone simply because it offers handy features that phone manufacturers have been doing away with lately. That includes a microSD card slot to expand the phone’s storage beyond its internal 128GB of space, a headphone jack so you can use it with wired headphones instead of needing to buy an adapter, and a wall charger. If only it had a removable battery, the phone would be a complete throwback to some of the earliest and best phone models of yesteryear.
How Well Does the Motorola Moto G Stylus 5G Work?
This is a fine phone for all the things most people use their phone for everyday: checking emails, watching YouTube, scrolling through news and social media feeds.
The Moto G Stylus is one slick phone, both in look and feel. It has a very shiny plastic back. (Mine came in a Twilight Blue color and there’s a Metallic Rose option.) The back does feel cheaper than the glass backs found in more expensive phones, but it also makes the phone feel lighter. The shiny look also feels a bit retro to me compared to the current matte-backed trend.
CR testers give the display high scores for its crispness and readability, although I found the screen to be dim at less than 100 percent brightness outdoors.
On the plus side, while switching between apps, scrolling through my photo gallery, and tapping through menus, the Moto G Stylus was as smooth as butter. It was even able to run the demanding game Genshin Impact, albeit with some stuttering. (If you’re looking for the best phone for action-packed gaming, you’d be better off with a phone like the OnePlus 10T, which has a better screen, the newest chipset, more memory, and a higher 120-hertz refresh rate. You’d need to shell out $650 for the OnePlus 10T, though.)
The main attraction of the Moto G Stylus is the ability to write or draw on the screen with the included pen. As with the new Galaxy S22 Ultra and Samsung’s now-discontinued line of Note phones, the Moto G Stylus has a silo for the stylus. At about the width of the phone’s charging cord, the stylus is very thin. I prefer the thicker and longer stylus that I bought for my S21 Ultra, even though my phone doesn’t house the S Pen, but when I showed the Moto G Stylus to my teenage daughter, she preferred its stylus, saying it’s lighter and easier to control. To each their own.
I love the convenience, though, of popping the stylus out of the Moto G Stylus and writing on the lock screen immediately, without having to wake the phone. It’s handy for quickly jotting down a grocery list or the parking spot number where you’ve left your car. Also, if the stylus gets disconnected from the phone for a long period of time, you’ll be greeted with a warning noise from the device.
Software-wise, I don’t think the Moto Note app is as robust as Samsung’s version, which lets you add tags to notes, save them as Microsoft Office files or PDFs, and more. However, the Moto G Stylus offers all the note-taking and doodling basics: choices of ink colors and pen sizes, folders to organize your notes, and even an on-screen ruler so you can draw precise, straight lines.
The stylus often skipped lines when I was testing the phone and my handwriting was much less legible on the Moto G Stylus than it was on my own Galaxy S21 Ultra phone. But unless you want to draw a detailed masterpiece on your phone, the pen experience is fine.
I took a few quick photos and videos with the Moto G Stylus too. They came out decent, to my amateur photographer’s eyes, although a couple of shots were out of focus because of a lag between my tapping the shutter button and the phone taking the photo. The phone does have a “night vision” mode, however, along with other modes like panorama and group selfie that are not common on budget phones. The rear image quality, video quality, and selfie image quality earn just okay scores from our professional testers.
Finally, the Moto G Stylus has a fingerprint sensor on the power button—again, a throwback to models of old that let you unlock your phone via a physical button instead of an on-screen one. Setting up the fingerprint unlock was a pain because it took multiple tries but once that was done, I found it very responsive and a more convenient way to quickly get into the phone than other options.
Who Is the Motorola Moto G Stylus 5G For?
If you don’t need the premium materials or cameras found on Samsung’s top-of-the-line Galaxy S22 Ultra but are interested in a phone with a stylus, this is the phone for you.
At these prices, though, it’s also a good pick even if you never use the stylus and want a basic phone. It has expandable storage. It offers substantial screen real estate. And in my brief time with the phone, I found its performance to be quite zippy.
The Moto G Stylus doesn't perform quite as well as other stylus-enabled phones, but it costs hundreds of dollars less.
Photo: Motorola
The $200 model is a particularly good deal if you don’t need 5G—for example, if you live in an area outside of 5G coverage or prefer 4G because it uses less battery. So far, 5G hasn’t lived up to its hype, so you may not want to spend the extra $150 just for that.
At $350, the 5G model is still a bargain. It has a newer chipset, more memory, a higher refresh rate, and camera stabilization to compensate for shaky hands.
If you want the latest and the greatest phone with the best cameras, of course, this is not it. Also worth noting: The non-5G model ships with Android 11 and may only get Android 12, along with three years of security updates. The 5G model ships with Android 12 and will get Android 13 and the same patches.
How Consumer Reports Tests Smartphones
There are nearly 50 smartphones in our ratings, with new models added regularly throughout the year when manufacturers release them. As with all the products we test, CR buys the phones at retail to ensure we’re getting the same device you would.
Our experts run a series of tests to evaluate things like the phone’s touch responsiveness, how long the battery lasts, the color accuracy and clarity of the screen, the image quality from the cameras under multiple lighting conditions, and, if it’s rated for water resistance, whether the device survives a good dunk. We even subject phones to a tumbler test, in which we drop the phone 100 times to test its durability.
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