The $499.99 Motorola Moto G Stylus for 2026 covers the basics for a midrange phone. It is one of the very few phones that include a stylus for writing on the screen, have a long-lasting battery, a watertight design, and even pack user-favorites like a 3.5mm headphone jack and memory card support. I wish it didn't use the same processor as last year's phone, had sharper cameras, offered smarter AI tools, and had a longer support commitment from Motorola. Ultimately, the $499 Google Pixel 10a is a better option—and PCMag's Editors' Choice—thanks to its similar build quality, more capable cameras, powerful AI, and superior support window.

Design: Plain, But Textured

At 6.39 by 2.94 by 0.33 inches (HWD), the Moto G Stylus is taller but thinner than the Pixel 10a (6.10 by 2.90 by 0.40 inches), which is not insignificant when you're holding it to type two-handed. The Moto device is denser than Google's, at 6.77 ounces for the G Stylus and 6.46 ounces for the Pixel 10a. It's your choice between a taller, wider device and a narrower, shorter one.

(Credit: Florence Ion)

Motorola has clearly settled on its backside aesthetic. You'll notice similarities between the Moto G Stylus and the Razr Fold, its pricier foldable stablemate. The rear-facing, four-sensor array offers the illusion that this is a capable camera device. It's a fantasy we'll talk more about in the camera section.

It comes in two colors: Pantone-patented Coal Smoke and Lavender Mist, the former of which is the one I was graced with. From afar, it's a plain Jane with a smoky textured background. Motorola has definitely improved the design of its affordable phones. If you remember, the Moto G Stylus (2023) had a sheen back, and although it looked pretty in the sun, it was a slip-sliding mess.

(Credit: Florence Ion)

Moto boasts the G Stylus's military-grade MIL-STG-18H standard, which means the phone was tested for durability against drops, shocks, vibrations, and extreme temperatures. It also offers IP68/69-rated dust, sand, and water resistance, nearly matching the Razr Fold's robustness. You wouldn't think this phone was as water-resistant as it's labeled, given all the holes in it.

(Credit: Florence Ion)

Speaking of holes, I'm referring to three at the bottom of the device: the USB-C charging port, the 3.5mm headphone jack, and the enclave cutout for the speakers. The stylus is housed at the bottom, too, and pops out just like Samsung's S Pen in the Galaxy Ultra series.

There are no secretly programmable action buttons here, just a power button and volume up and down on the right side, the opposite formation that you would find on a Pixel. The phone ships with 128GB or 256GB of storage and a microSD slot for up to 1TB of additional storage. It's a terrific excuse to put your entire digital media collection on one tiny chip.

Display: Glaringly Bright

(Credit: Florence Ion)

The Moto G Stylus features a 6.7-inch AMOLED display, protected by Gorilla Glass 3. It's the same screen Motorola used on last year's model. It's a larger display than the Pixel 10a (6.3 inches). The advantage of the bigger screen is that there's slightly more space to scrawl with the stylus. The display is so slippery, though, that putting the phone top-down on a pillow will surely cause it to slide off.

The screen has a variable refresh rate of 120Hz. Like the Pixel 10a, it fluctuates between 60Hz and 120Hz. I used an app called DevCheck to check the refresh rate, and often the Moto G Stylus 2026 consistently displayed at 90Hz. If you want the screen to always refresh at the highest rate, you can toggle 120Hz on in the settings, though this may drain the battery quicker.

(Credit: Florence Ion)

Motorola advertises 5,000 nits of peak brightness for the Moto G Stylus, compared with the Pixel 10a's 3,000 nits. The G Stylus can become glaringly bright outside, for example, when plane spotting, but it wasn't any more impressive than the 10a when held side by side. The Moto's raw brightness helps when sharing a YouTube clip in the sun, but the phone gets quite hot at that level.

The screen has good contrast and deep blacks, which is typical of this type of AMOLED panel, though it's also how Moto tunes the display. Its default tuning is Vivid. I went into the settings and dialed down both the Moto G Stylus and Pixel 10a to their respective Natural color modes to get a better idea of the color differences between screens. The Pixel 10a's Actua display technology is cooler-toned than the Moto G Stylus' warmer hues, though I found myself gravitating toward the former for its sharpness. The Pixel 10a offers a sharper pixel density, despite having a lower 2,400-by-1,080-pixel resolution than the Moto G Stylus's 2,712-by-1,220-pixel resolution, since there's less screen real estate to stretch pixels across.

Performance: Aging Expectations

(Credit: Florence Ion)

Motorola ships the phone with the Qualcomm Snapdragon 6 Gen 3. The chip was released in 2024, appeared in last year's Moto G Stylus, and is decidedly mid-tier right out of the gate. To be fair, its aim is prioritizing power efficiency over pushing pixels, which is exactly why the Moto G Stylus has such stellar battery life. But whichever way you slice it, Google and the Pixel 10a's Tensor G4 has the better strategy within its ecosystem, and the proof is in the benchmark pudding.

(Credit: Geekbench/3DMark/PCMark/PCMag)

Both phones have 8GB of RAM across all configurations. The Pixel 10a's Tensor chip, however, features higher-capacity cores, which is why it produces better sustained Geekbench 6 scores than the Moto G Stylus. The G Stylus trails the Pixel 10a's single-core score of 1,752 with a single-core score of 1,006. Its multi-core score is even worse at 2,979, far behind the Pixel's 4,423. Google's 4nm 2024-era flagship chip is in a different league than the similar-era mid-ranger from Qualcomm.

I can foresee the experience destabilizing over time. I was already dealing with lag in Pokémon Go, simply scrolling through the menu screens. If you're hoping to play a graphics-heavy game with the Moto G Stylus, you might find it stumbling down the line. In 3DMark's Wildlife Extreme test, for example, I watched as the Moto G Stylus stuttered behind, scoring 880, while the Pixel 10a scored 2,699. It was painful to witness.

Stylus: Good for Some Things

(Credit: Florence Ion)

Yes, it's nice having a stylus on you at all times, and it's especially novel during a time when farming games and simulators are my favorite things to play. As you can imagine, I enjoy having access to an apparatus that lets me tap ever so specifically when I need it. It was super useful to trim a video with an app like InShot. I even used the stylus to easily highlight bands I want to see from the Warped Tour roster.

However, beyond that, getting any creative work done with this particular device would be a lesson in patience. I actually feel the same way about the Galaxy S26 Ultra, which comes with an S Pen that relies too much on AI magic to make a straight line. It was relieving not to deal with that kind of software trickery on the Moto G Stylus, a much less expensive device, but there just isn't enough screen for a tool like this. I like the sold-separately stylus with the Moto Razr Fold for getting work done, since the larger screen inside gives you more room to be creative.

(Credit: Florence Ion)

Also, it's worth noting that I had a few times when I had trouble popping the stylus back into its housing. In fact, I almost lost the stylus at the beach during a photoshoot.

Battery: Moto Loves a Marathon

The Moto's 5,200mAh battery is larger than you'll find in many flagship devices—and 200mAh bigger than the battery in last year's phone. Since it's not a demanding system, this battery pack endures. Indeed, I went nearly two days on a full battery with regular use, starting at 5:00 p.m. Thursday and not needing to charge the device until 11:00 a.m. the following Saturday, when it hit the red at 11%.

Motorola promises 44 hours of battery life from the Moto G Stylus. In testing, the phone lasts a solid 15 hours and 26 minutes, about the same as last year's G Stylus (15 hours, 30 minutes). This is one metric where the G Stylus handily bests the 10a (12 hours, 15 minutes).

The phone can charge as quick as 68W via Motorola's TurboPower wired charging, though there's no brick in the box. It charges fast when it can. With a Motorola Turbo 30W charger, I was able to charge to about 68% in 53 minutes. The phone also supports up to 15W wireless charging, a nice bump up from the Pixel 10a's 10W.

Connectivity: A Matter of Throughput

The Moto G Stylus supports a variety of sub-6GHz 5G bands, including the C-band, but not Verizon's mmWave. I tested it on a Mint SIM. The Moto G Stylus managed to hit 545Mbps down and 56Mbps up right outside the park down my street. As I moved around my neighborhood, the download speed remained steady at 349Mbps, while the upload speed was 18Mbps.

I tested the Pixel 10a on a Google Fi SIM in the same spot, and the results were much more consistent. More importantly, the Pixel's modem is what enables its emergency satellite communication feature. The Moto G Stylus does not offer Satellite SOS in case of an emergency.

The Moto G Stylus is compatible with Wi-Fi 6E and supports 6GHz speeds, if your router is capable. You can definitely tell there are differences in antenna tuning when you run disparate tests on two phones pinging the same router.

On my home Wi-Fi, the Moto capped out at 501Mbps for downloads and 40Mbps for uploads, while the Pixel 10a achieved download speeds of 749Mbps and upload speeds of 41Mbps. The Pixel 10a might handle network throughput better than the Moto G Stylus, though it's also likely that Motorola's software tuning keeps bandwidth traffic steady to avoid sapping the battery.

Audio: Don't Forget the Headphone Jack

(Credit: Florence Ion)

The coveted headphone jack returns to the Moto G Stylus this year. It's a solid choice for anyone still driving a car before Bluetooth was required for phone calls, since you can literally plug it in to listen to music as you please. If you prefer headphones, the Moto G Stylus is solid with any pair of Bluetooth headphones, and the range is quite nice, too, with up-to-date Bluetooth 5.4.

Listening to music out loud is a different experience. The speakers only play audio from the bottom edge, so there's no stereo. The louder the TikTok, the more strain you might hear as you try to get the music and dialogue to bellow out clearly, though it does get quite loud. If you're trying to listen to music with this thing, plug in a pair of physical speakers. If you don't have a pair, it makes for a nice quest to the thrift store.

Phone calls are clear on speakerphone and with the earpiece. The earpiece reaches 78dB during a phone call. It reaches up to 90 dB on speakerphone, depending on how loud the person on the other end is. The phone is generally much louder than the Pixel 10a.

Camera: Capable, But Not Dependable

(Credit: Florence Ion)

Motorola is good at providing the glass but not so much at tweaking the software for better results. There's a 50MP main camera with OIS and a 13MP ultrawide with autofocus, compared with the Pixel's 48MP fixed-focus ultrawide.

(Credit: Florence Ion)

(Credit: Florence Ion)

Don't try to do anything too fancy with the Moto G Stylus. I didn't want to share the photos I snapped with it on Instagram Stories, but I did anyway to see how it looks on the other end. I preferred the Pixel 10a's slightly tuned shots over the Moto's. The Pixel skews bluer in its color temperature, producing more vivid scenes than those I shot with the Moto. Sometimes, Motorola increased contrast and brightened whites to indicate enhancement, but it didn't make the photos look any less like they were shot with a cheaper phone. And don't even bother with nightography here, because the Pixel 10a's the only one that does the starry-night thing. The Moto G Stylus could barely capture the faint light peering through the evening clouds, whereas Google's algorithms are more aggressive about background details to enhance the scene.

(Credit: Florence Ion)

(Credit: Florence Ion)

I don't recommend using the digital zoom tool, though. To be fair, the Pixel 10a does not produce the kind of results I was hoping for either. Both of these devices lack proper telephoto sensors, so going beyond 2x is asking for trouble. You can see from the seagull photos that the Moto G Stylus's digital zoom is heavy on artificial processing, resulting in blob-like gulls.

(Credit: Florence Ion)

The front-facing camera is 32MP. By default, when you switch to selfie mode, the camera app brightens the screen, ostensibly providing extra lighting for your face. I wasn't a fan of the photos I took of myself with the Moto G Stylus (but only because I haven't been sleeping well). I actually appreciated the extra lighting. There is a built-in beautification filter that you can adjust as you see fit. I have no shame about using those sorts of things to help smooth my middle-aged lines a bit.

The Motorola can record 4K up to 30 frames per second. If you care about video, it's better on the Pixel 10a at this price, which can record at 4K60.

Software: You've Seen It Before

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Motorola's serving of the Android software seems barebones at first, but digging into the menus reveals some attempts at differentiation. You can customize the launcher with as much flair as on the Pixel, though Moto has merely repackaged what's already natively offered on the platform. There are gestures you won't get on other devices, like Fast Flashlight, which lets you make a chop motion with the phone to turn it on, and Quick Capture, which launches the camera with the quick twist of your wrist. Both have long been staples of the Moto phone experience. You'll also get Moto AI, which includes things like the Daily Digest, which I found mostly repetitive after opting into Gemini's newest feature, the Daily Brief.

Motorola's copycat software is mostly fine, even if it is a bit redundant on top of everything else Google offers natively in the Android OS. It's Motorola's update policy that's most concerning, considering major players like Google and Samsung have committed to seven years of software and security support. By contrast, Motorola offers only two major Android updates for the Moto G Stylus and three years of security patches, meaning by 2029 the phone will be effectively outdated. That's not much of a deal for the price when you consider the Pixel 10a is guaranteed by Google in its support pages through 2033.