Moto G Stylus 5G (2022) Intro

Yes, that’s exactly what the Motorola Moto G Stylus 5G (2022) has in tow for us, along with a true tongue-twister of a name. It’s a phone that trots along with tons of features missing from most of its mid-range competitors. What’s more, it addresses some of the weak points of its predecessor, making for an excellent follow-up to last year’s Moto G Stylus. 

What’s new on the Moto G Stylus 5G (2022) 

Table of Contents:

Moto G Stylus 5G (2022) Unboxing

Inside the box of the Moto G Stylus 5G (2022), you’ll find:

Moto G Stylus 5G (2022) Specs

Key improvements in core areas

So, what are the full Moto G Stylus 5G (2022) specs? Let’s explore!

In this price range, plastic phones are still a common sight, with just a few glass and metal juggernauts breaking the trend. And yes, while plastic isn’t regarded that highly by most consumers and reviewers alike, it should generally be expected in the sub $500 range. 

That said, the Moto G Stylus 5G is made of plastic, and while it doesn’t stand out with anything particular in its build, it’s simply a good-looking and well-made phone. It feels solid and robust, with a reassuring but not overwhelming heft and a design language that combines the aesthetics of industrial flat edges with the comfort of a slightly curved backplate that fits so nicely in one’s palm. There’s also a 3.5mm audio jack at the bottom, as well as expandable storage, two very big blasts from the past. 

Sure, the bezels are asymmetrical and on the thick side, but that’s to be expected in this price range. One downside of the specific plastic used on the Moto G Stylus is that it’s a smudge magnet and easily gets dirty. You might want to invest in a case, not just for protection reasons, but also to minimize oily fingerprint smudges.

The phone feels nice to use, and although the sheer size of it makes it cumbersome to use with a single hand, we had no issues with its overall handling in our day-to-day usage.

Steel Blue and Seafoam Green are the two colors in which the Moto G Stylus is available, and we had our hands on the blue variant. The actual color hue is quite dark in real-life, but definitely suits the phone and gives it a sophisticated vibe. 

Stylus

As we already mentioned, one of the intriguing aspects of the Moto G Stylus is, well, its stylus, which rests snuggly in its dedicated silo on the bottom right side of the device. It’s a regular stylus, without any functional buttons or an included capacitor on board; just a plain completely round pen that can be inserted in any orientation. 

Just like on Samsung’s S Pen phones, you take this one out by clicking its top button and taking it out with your fingertips quickly and easily. The stylus itself is quite comfortable to use despite its super thin profile. Have in mind that pressure sensitivity like on Samsung’s pricier phones isn’t available on this phone, so you’d 

The downside of the accessory is its tip. Unlike Samsung’s S Pen styluses, which closely resemble a pencil and have sharp tips, the Moto G Stylus pen has a semi-circular tip, resembling the mesh of a microphone’s windscreen. It’s not very accurate and writing with the stylus feels weird. Even after a week or so, it’s hard to get used to it, but for the occasional quick note or a quick photo edit, it’s good enough.

Aside from a fingerprint scanner in the power button, we also have the option to use face unlock on the Moto G Stylus 5G (2022). It’s a picture-based unlocking method, making it super snappy but generally not recommended if tight security is required. Overall, the regular fingerprint was fast enough, so that was our go-to option. 

Low-light images are a bit noisy, and Moto’s Night Vision tends to add a bit too much oversharpening.

One of the main concerns with the current camera setup is the consistency gap between the main and the ultra-wide camera. Whereas the main camera happily outputs photos with pretty realistic colors and good dynamic range, the ultra-wide camera has almost garish colors in comparison, and often tends to be too lax with its Auto HDR, often leading to burnt highlights. 

Portraits utilize the dedicated depth camera sensor to differentiate the subject from the background, and for the most part, does a good job. Portraits, however, turn out to be a bit too soft either. Selfies, on the opposite contrary, are a bit oversharpened.

The Moto G Stylus 5G (2022) comes along with a Snapdragon 695 5G chipset, a 6nm endeavor consisting of two Kryo 660 Gold P-cores (ARM Cortex-A78 based) running at 2.2GHz, and six 1.7GHz Kryo 660 Silver E-cores, with the Adreno 619 GPU on deck. Right from the bat, the new chipset is a very big improvement over last year’s Moto G Stylus, which was powered by the Snapdragon 480 chipset, which consists of eight Kryo 460 cores clocked at 2GHz. 

The chipset in the new Moto G Stylus is much faster and way more efficient, making performance one of the addressed aspects of the Moto G Stylus (2021). However, at this price point, it seems as if you can have better.  Here’s how the Moto G Stylus performs against its predecessor and some similarly-priced. 

Performance Benchmarks:

The synthetic benchmark do paint a picture, but it’s not the complete one. In real life usage, the Snapdragon 695 inside the Moto performs well and feels perfectly capable. The only relative slowdowns we experienced are usually during the generation of a fresh Minecraft world, and when rapidly switching between apps. 

Our review unit came with 8GB of RAM and 256GB of on-board storage, which is the top-tier variant of the Moto G Stylus. A pleasant surprise was the RAM Boost feature, hidden inside the settings menus, which effectively bumps the amount of RAM up to 10GB. There’s also tons of available space, and let’s not forget the microSD card extension slot, which is certainly a nice to have.

We have NFC on the Moto G Stylus 5G (2022), and that’s a big deal since it addresses one of our main concerns with last year’s Moto G Stylus. Surely, having NFC on board enables contactless payments and introduces easy communication with eligible devices and NFC tags, so definitely a nice thing to have.  

Android 12 is running on the Moto G Stylus 5G (2022), and just like most Motorola phones, it comes with a fairly vanilla version of Android, with just a handful of Motorola-specific features and functionalities that are actually improving the core Android formula. 

Moto G Stylus 5G (2022) Battery

On the PhoneArena browsing battery test, which involves automated web surfing and scrolling over a Wi-Fi network at 200 nits of pre-set screen brightness, the Moto G Stylus 5G (2022) endured for 16 hours and 35 minutes with the refresh rate set at Auto, which is more than a commendable result. Meanwhile, the phone lasted for 6 hours and 38 minutes in our custom 3D gaming test at 200 nits of brightness, which is also an awe-inspiring result. 

PhoneArena Battery Test Results:

The haptic feedback isn’t great either. The vibrator motor feels slow and clunky, lacking the pleasant and crisp operation of more sophisticated taptic engines. And yet, that’s to be expected.