Moto G Stylus Review (2025): The Price Is Right, But Motorola Is Coasting

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As a phone reviewer, I spend a lot of time with flagship phones and other devices that have every bell and whistle. Top-tier phones (with all the most advanced features) also have a tendency to cost north of $800 if you were to buy them off-contract, all at once. Those phones are fun because there's little that they can't do. You can replace your laptop with a phone if you want to.

Then there are the midrange phones, which is where the space gets very interesting. Suddenly, choices have to be made about what to keep and what to get rid of. Where will the compromises be less noticeable, or at least more understandable? In the midrange space, not everyone thinks the same choices are as important. Google's Pixel 9a focuses on camera chops; the Nothing Phone (3a) Pro focuses on design and software.

Then there's Motorola, who's been towing the line for the low-cost stylus-included smartphone with the Moto G Stylus lineup for half a decade. LG made their LG Stylo lineup back in 2015 (with a low-cost stylus in the mix for several years) — and the same angle seems to keep popping up: does Samsung's approach mean a stylus can only reasonably work in a phone when the features match the (high) price? 

Motorola sent over an Moto G Stylus (2025) for this review — I have been spending the last week with this phone, trying to figure out if the stylus is the killer feature the midrange space is missing.

Aside from the stylus that is garaged within the device, the specs on this phone all fit neatly into the midrange category. Under the display lies a Snapdragon 6 Gen 3 processor, 128 or 256 GB of storage, and 8GB LPDDR4X RAM. That's along with a (mostly) dual camera setup, and a 5,000 mAh battery.

When it comes to performance, the phone is not a screamer. It's capable of accomplishing most tasks with reasonable efficiency. This is not a flagship that is going to be launching an app before your thumb is done moving away from the icon to tapped, but it will be reasonably quick. I ran into a few hiccups where the phone would bog down a bit, often in the camera software. There were also a few occasions when an app would inexplicably crash. These weren't common occurrences by any stretch of the imagination, but they happened often enough that they were noticeable.

As for battery life, this phone is great. Even on days I found myself off Wi-Fi and snapping photos and video, the phone lasted well into the second day. On days that I stayed home, I wouldn't have been surprised to make it into a third day. The phone sips battery power, and the fact that there's a 5,000 mAh pack in here despite the phone being very thin is a really compelling package.

The backplate is what it's quickly becoming Motorola' standard vegan leather backplate, and I especially like the grippiness it offers. You can put a case on this phone, but you probably won't want to.

The display on this phone is quite good. It's a 6.7-inch pOLED Super HD display with an adaptive refresh rate of up to 120Hz and a peak brightness of 3,000 nits. This is one of the nicest displays I've seen on a phone in this price range (less than $400). Often the display is one of the first corners cut; you either get lower resolution, a lower refresh rate, or the display just doesn't have good color reproduction. You won't find any of those issues here.

I wish I could be as positive about the stylus. Motorola's included a typical passive stylus with this device — nothing particularly fancy about it. There's a button on the end that's only there to help you eject it; there's no other smart functionality. 

When you eject the stylus with the phone off, it auto-launches a notes app, which can be handy for jotting something down quickly. When the phone is powered on, you get a menu of different options you can choose, including sketch to image, handwriting calculator and more.

Overall, the stylus is just fine. It's not great. It does what I expect any stylus to do — accurately tap the screen where I want and do some drawings. Handwriting text into text boxes was spotty and only worked about 50% of the time. Palm rejection was pretty bad. Often if your hand was resting on the screen, the stylus just didn't work. Considering the name "stylus" is in the title, I wish Motorola had refined this part a little bit more.

Motorola used to build my favorite skin of Android. These days, on your standard Android phone (non-foldable, that is,) Motorola is in third place behind Nothing and Pixel. Motorola has spent a lot of time refining its software and perfecting it even when it flew its banner under the Google Umbrella. I can't fault Moto for not really advancing its software; I'm guilty of saying Motorola should leave its software as is and focus on other aspects because it's fun to use.

That being said, I'm still confused about Motorola's insistence on bringing a lot of its software features under the Moto App rather than simply putting these feature settings in the Settings menu. It can be frustrating to open a couple of different apps just to find a setting you're looking for. For example, I disabled the menu that pops up every time you take out the stylus, then I later wanted to re-enable it, but I had to do some hunting to find it.

The Moto G Stylus 2025 comes with three-ish sensors on the back. The main camera is a 50-megapixel shooter with an f/1.8 aperture. The Ultrawide camera is a 13-megapixel sensor with a 120-degree field of view. The third sensor is a 3-in-1 light sensor, so for all intents and purposes, there are two cameras on the back. The front-facing sensor is a 32-megapixel sensor.

Adam Doud/SlashGear

During the day, the camera is pretty good, though it skews a bit darker than I'd normally like. Color consistency between lenses is where you'd like it to be as well. Portrait mode is a bit on the clunky side, chopping off stray hairs with no mercy.

Adam Doud/SlashGear

Macro shooting and 2x zoom capture are both surprisingly good considering this phone's pedigree. Macro focus picks the bubbles on the flower petals very nicely. Meanwhile, 2x lossless zoom (sensor crop) gets you very respectable closeups

At night, it's a typical midrange story. Video is basically unusable with detectable grain in the black areas. Photos are "social media good" when your subject is not moving. Social media good basically means if you want to post the photo you take to Instagram, you'll be ok, but don't try to view it on anything bigger than a phone screen.

Adam Doud/SlashGear

When your subject stays still, you can capture some nice shots — that are still limited to a phone-sized screen. The Ultrawide can even perform decently at night, with the same restrictions on movement. Once things start moving though, things fall apart fast and become a blurry mess. This is not unique for cameras at this price point, but this is also not an insurmountable goal. Some midrange phones are starting to up their game in this department; it's time for Motorola to do the same.

The Moto G Stylus is available from most carriers and the Motorola Store on Amazon for $399.99. That's not a bad price for what you get with the phone. The display is quite wonderful, the stylus is handy in some circumstances, and there's even a 3.5mm headphone jack if you still care about such things.

At $399, this phone is priced right, under both of its more recent competitors, the Nothing Phone (3a) Pro (though $20 more than the non-pro version) and the Pixel 9a, but both of those other phones have a halo feature that is a compelling argument to buy. The Moto G Stylus doesn't really have that. The stylus itself is neat, but it doesn't work very well, and even when it does, it doesn't do much. But a stylus can be very much a "better to have it and not need it proposition."

Beyond that, there's not much to dislike about this phone, and even those disagreeable parts are mostly chalked up to compromises. You could do a lot worse than this phone at this price point, especially if you're a fan of the stylus. If you're not, then you should probably consider other options since the selling point here is that accessory. Without it, the Moto G Stylus is a capable midrange phone that fits nicely into its price niche. That being said, if you can afford more, get more.