Moto G Stylus (2022) review: Motorola’s true flagship
Motorola is no stranger to making budget-friendly phablets with a stylus—the new Moto G Stylus is the company’s third such phone in recent years, and this seems like another competent entry in that nearly nonexistent category. This model has some nice-to-have features that are usually skipped in flagships, like a microSD slot and a headphone jack, as well as increasingly common features in the budget segment, like a fingerprint reader and a 90Hz display.
The 2022 G Stylus isn’t strictly a year-over-year improvement on this midrange lineup, though. Like the 2022Moto G Power, this model adopts a MediaTek chipset. You could do better for $300 than the G Stylus, but it’s a solid value, and less than a third the price of the new Edge+.
Moto G Stylus 2022
The new Moto G Stylus upgrades its camera, display, and battery, but still manages to be a sideways move from last year’s model because of its swap from a Snapdragon to a MediaTek chipset.
Design, hardware, what’s in the box
At 6.8 inches, the G Stylus is a big phone. The display clocks in at 1080x2460 with a 90Hz refresh rate, which is a nice step up from the 720p screens we’ve seen on most budget phones lately. The IPS screen still looks pretty good with nice and vibrant colors. The brightness is also sufficient enough to see in direct sunlight. Black comes across more like dark gray instead of a perfect OLED black, but it’s still good for casual content consumption… as long as you have headphones. The single bottom-firing speaker shares space with the headphone jack, charge port, and a stylus—that’s the only speaker. Amplified earpieces have been common on phones for alongtime, and it feels like a weird exclusion on a phone otherwise geared so well towards watching YouTube when you’ve got a spare half hour. The 2020 Stylus had stereo speakers, but that’s just one of several cut corners here.
While the body is clearly styled to resemble the glass sandwich design of high-end phones, the matte frame and shiny back are both plastic. While it doesn’t look as good as an actual glass back, it’s just as much of a fingerprint magnet. The camera bump on the back is minimal and cuts down from the four cameras on the last model to 3. More later about why that’s agoodthing. The right side of the phone has the volume rocker and the power button/fingerprint reader. Unlocking with the fingerprint sensor isn’t lightning fast, but it’s much faster than if you use face unlock.
As previously mentioned, the stylus is found in the bottom of the phone. Just like previous iterations, it has the all-too-familiar click-in/click-out mechanism to give you a handle to grab onto. The stylus may be skinny and a little shorter than I’d like, but it’s not awkward or uncomfortable to hold, even though my hands are a bit larger than average. Unlike the S Pen from Samsung or the stylus announced with theMoto Edge+, this stylus just has a capacitive mesh tip. This makes it less accurate than one with a solid tip, but gives you some semblance of pressure sensitivity since more pressure means more of the tip is on the screen.
The 10w power brick and USB type A to C cable that come with the G Stylus are pretty unremarkable, but a perfect match for the 10w max charge speed of the phone. I’d have preferred a type-C to C cable to make transferring from an old phone more convenient, and the slow 2.0 speeds of the port don’t help on that front either, but I wouldn’t call either of those things a deal-breaker.
Software, performance, battery life
Motorola usually ships phones with a very close to stock android experience, and the G Stylus is no exception. At first I thought the preinstalled Moto app was just advertising bloatware, but it actually introduces you to gesture controls with links to turn them on or off in settings. Beginner-friendly considerations like this are welcome in my book.
While the MediaTek Helio G88 in the G Stylus isn’t particularly powerful, it’s not so underpowered that the phone suffers. It is at best a lateral move from the Snapdragon 678 in last year’s Stylus—it’s not quite as fast, but performance is still in the range of what we’d expect in this price range. There’s the occasional hitch in opening apps and browsing the web, but most games still run smoothly. Titles like Genshin Impact don’t run very well, but playing less demanding games like CSR2 without noticeable frame drops is a breeze, even when locked in at 90fps.
Motorola claims 2-day battery life out of the 5000 mAh battery, and that checks out. 48 hours after a charge, the battery was usually somewhere around 20%, and I felt comfortable leaving the house with way less battery than I would normally.
One of the main selling points of this phone is right in the name, and that’s the stylus. There are a few good optimizations for it, like palm rejection when the stylus is in use and an optional quick access menu that pops up when you take the stylus out. That floating menu can easily be customized to have any app in it, which is nice if you find yourself using the same apps every time you take your stylus out. If you’re forgetful like me, the Moto notes app can also use your location to track where you took your stylus out last.
Even though the camera bump proudly proclaims 50 megapixels, you only get all those pixels in the “Ultra Res” camera mode. By default, it shoots in 12.5MP viapixel binning. In addition to the main shooter found in the middle of the camera bump, at the top you’ll find an 8MP ultrawide pulling double duty for macro shots, and a 2MP depth sense lens at the bottom. Getting rid of the poor quality 2MP macro lens found on the last G Stylus is one of the few noticeable improvements Motorola has made with this model. While it’s plain to see that the 8MP ultrawide handles macro shots better than the old 2MP camera, I still wouldn’t say the results stand out among budget phones.
Pictures from the main shooter seem a bit soft in High Res mode and have a lot of artificial sharpness in the normal 12.5MP mode. During the middle of the day, even a little bit of cloud cover made all my high res pictures turn out dark. The extra light gained by binning the pixels down helps a lot in low light, but not enough to save you from motion blur. Even though it may not be a low-light champ, it still manages to pull some details out of darker areas of well lit scenes, and show details that might have been lost in the shadows otherwise. The auto white balance isn’t the greatest, with some of my post-dusk pictures drifting towards blue, but it isn’t so bad that it ruins any of the pictures.
On the front of the phone you’ll find a 16MP hole-punch selfie camera, but just like the main shooter, Motorola leans on Pixel binning to boost brightness. No matter if I was shooting in 4 or 16 megapixels, every selfie I took on this lens fell short of my Instagram standards. Even with all the AI modes turned off, there was averyaggressive beauty filter. On top of that, the colors were always flat and muddy.
Should you buy it?
Maybe.There’s aren’t enough improvements for this to be worth trading in your old Moto G Stylus, and the chipset is more of a lateral change from last year’s Snapdragon processor than an upgrade. If you absolutely need a stylus for some reason, I’d consider the slightly more expensive G Stylus 5G from late last year instead, but if you’re dead set on that $300 price point, this isn’t a terrible choice.
Buy it if…
Don’t buy it if…
UPDATE: 2022/04/05 BY CONNOR NOLAN
It has its place
I’ve been using the Moto Stylus almost every day since I did my initial review. Even when it wasn’t my daily, I usually at least pulled it out for some mindless gaming in the evening or some Sudoku with my morning coffee. I took a break from using it to focus more onreviewing the Motorola Edge+, and expected the stylus to be dead by the time I got back to it over a week later. I was pleasantly surprised to see that it had pulled through that stretch of time with a bit of charge left, even though I forgot to turn it off.
While It’s impressive that it managed to do that, that’s not exactly a real-world scenario with actual daily use benefits. It’s still a comfortable 2-day phone, though. I don’t hesitate leaving home unless it’s under 40% charge.
That being said, that’s where the pleasant surprises thin out. As of writing, the Stylus isstillon the same December 1st security patch that it launched with. Motorola has always had a spotty history with updates, and I was hopeful that when Motorola announced the plan to pare down updates to everyothermonth, that goal would be easier to accomplish. Yes, it’s been less than two months since the Stylus was released, but I’d have expected the security update to be a higher priority. Motorola recentlyreached the number-three spot in the US, thanks mostly to G-series sales. For all intents and purposes, this is the company’srealflagship. Moto needs to step it up.
Speaking of things that were old before this phone shipped, the MediaTek chipset in the Stylus swings wildly from surprisingly good to disappointing. In games, it’s solid, and I really appreciate having such a large screen with a 90Hz refresh rate, all at 1080 to boot.Outsideof games is a different story, though. Too many times to count, the Stylus has just hung for seemingly no reason. I’ve clicked links and had to sit there for several seconds, not waiting on the page to load, but waiting on the phone tostartto load the link, screen frozen, unable to even scroll. It isn’t a constant issue, but it happens several times a day, and it feels very related to the nearly 2 year-old processor in the Stylus. Hopefully, Moto can optimize better in a future update.Hint hint, Moto.
Lastly, I mentioned how much I liked the screen in the initial review, which is sharp and fast, but it’s worth mentioning that the glass on front isnotGorilla Glass, and they don’t say what it is (probably some cheaper material like Dragontrail glass). One of my favorite Moto gestures is do-not-disturb when turned over, and my habitual use of that without a case or screen protector has left the screen covered in light scratches and scuffs. It’s a good thing that there’s no shortage of cases available for the Stylus, because I’d call it a non-optional purchase with this phone.
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