$100 more for not much extra

Everything’s getting more expensive lately, and a perfect storm of supply chain disruptions has hit electronics especially hard — from budget models to flagships, smartphone prices have been creeping up this year. Case in point: Motorola’s latest Moto G Stylus. The 2026 model starts at $499, a $100 increase over the pretty darn good 2025 edition.

For your extra $100, you’ll get a new active stylus, along with a handful of other minor improvements. But with the same chipset, RAM, cameras, and design language as the 2025 model (along with some other annoyances), I don’t think the Moto G Stylus (2026) ($499.99 at Amazon) does enough to justify the higher price tag.

Where last year’s Moto G Stylus came with a passive stylus, this year’s phone gets an active stylus that can do quite a bit more. It can detect pressure and tilt, which should make taking notes or sketching feel more natural compared to the previous version. The 2026 Moto G Stylus also features palm rejection when using the stylus — a big get compared to its predecessor. The new stylus is a bit thicker, too.

My favorite stylus feature is the ability to jot down quick notes. You can pop the Moto G Stylus’s pen out and start writing immediately, without opening any apps or even unlocking the phone. It’s not a unique feature to the G Stylus line, but it works well here. The new palm rejection is great when I’m jotting down a quick to-do, and newly added pressure sensitivity does make for some nice sensorial feedback.

You can configure a long-press on the stylus’s button to do a few things: take a screenshot to mark up, open a new note, magnify an area of the display, or open Circle to Search.

Circle to Search integration piqued my interest, but it feels a little clunky in practice. To activate the feature, you have to hold the stylus near the screen, press and hold its button, and wait a beat for the Circle to Search interface to appear before highlighting the content you want more info about, all of which takes longer and felt less natural than just activating Circle to Search with my finger. (I ended up assigning the button to open a new note.)

I was surprised to find the new active stylus can’t be used as a remote for the Moto G Stylus’s camera shutter. It’s not a feature I’d use often, but given the stylus’s new Bluetooth connectivity, it feels like a missed opportunity.

Beyond the stylus, there aren’t a ton of noteworthy upgrades here. Moto included faster UFS 3.1 storage that should make for marginal bumps in speed and efficiency (though that didn’t show up in our tests). The 2026 Moto G Stylus is also IP69 rated, meaning it’s certified to withstand harsher exposure to water than the 2025 model was at IP68.

The Moto G Stylus (2026)’s display comes with a higher peak brightness than the 2025 model did, but it’s otherwise a very similar (and entirely adequate) screen: still a 6.7-inch, 1220p AMOLED with a 120Hz refresh rate. The battery is also slightly larger with a 5,200 mAh capacity (up from 5,000).

Nearly every other aspect of the Moto G Stylus (2026) is lifted straight from the Moto G Stylus (2025). That’s not all bad — but for $100 more, it’s not great, either.

To start on a positive note: same as last year, the new Moto G Stylus retains both a microSD card slot and a 3.5-millimeter headphone jack, two now-throwback features that will be reason enough for certain shoppers to pick this phone up. I don’t have much use for either these days, but folks with big local media collections can use cards up to a terabyte in size to cart around their offline music catalogs. Nice.

External hardware is nearly unchanged from the 2025 model, too. The phone keeps the same look, feel, and overall proportions, though this model has a ridged texture on its back plastic, where last year’s model had a faux-leather texture. It comes in Coal Smoke (gray, pictured throughout) and Lavender Mist (purple) colors.

The latest Moto G Stylus (2026) comes with the same Snapdragon 6 Gen 3 as last year’s model, paired with the same 8GB of RAM. That’s not impressive, by any means, but it’s actually a competent enough combo for my needs; navigation, web browsing, social media, and even gaming all felt fine in my time with the phone.

The relatively simple Pokémon TCG Pocket runs nearly as well on the G Stylus as it does on my Pixel 9 Pro, and even the heavier Call of Duty: Mobile managed to keep up a high frame rate with decent detail. This certainly isn’t a gaming phone, but it holds its own running less demanding titles.

Of course, this performance is exactly the same as what you’d experience with last year’s Moto G Stylus, too — in our comparative benchmark test results, you can see the results for each are identical.

Motorola’s software experience is uneven. On the one hand, Moto’s implementation of Android is close to stock, there aren’t too many preinstalled apps, and the moment-to-moment experience of tooling around the phone’s UI is generally good, barring the odd hiccup.

But by default, there are entirely too many ads on this phone. In addition to the Google Discover feed to the left of the home screen (a hotbed for advertising itself), there’s a secondary news feed embedded in the Moto G Stylus’s app drawer — and it’s full of ads. Motorola’s unhelpful Gametime overlay that appears whenever a game is running offers sponsored game suggestions. The worst ads offender may be the preinstalled weather app from developer OneLouder Apps.

The 1Weather app pushes multiple notifications per day: sensational messages about natural disasters in states I don’t live in, vague warnings that “big changes” are in the forecast, and general reminders to open the app just because I haven’t in a while. These aggressive notifications aren’t ads themselves, but they’re in service of getting eyeballs on the ads sprinkled throughout 1Weather’s interface (though you do have the option pay $20 per year or $2 a month to go ad-free).

You can disable all these obnoxious streams of advertising, and I eventually did. But in a phone that costs $500, the ad experience out of the box is unacceptable. It’d be one thing if whatever revenue Moto generates from selling ad space throughout the Moto G Stylus’s software went to subsidize the phone’s hardware — but as we’ve been over, the latest model is nearly identical to the last one, and it costs $100 more.

It’s clear Moto’s ads strategy isn’t helping to fund long-term support for the Moto G Stylus, either. The 2026 model is guaranteed only two major Android updates (up to Android 18) along with three years of security patches (ending in the spring of 2029). Again: unacceptable.

Photography on the Moto G Stylus (2026) is also a mixed bag. The phone comes with the same cameras as last year’s model: a 50-megapixel primary camera (samples in the first gallery below) and a 13-megapixel ultrawide that pulls double-duty as a macro shooter (the second gallery), plus a 32-megapixel selfie camera. What looks like a third camera lens around back is apparently a light sensor that somehow helps the real cameras, and I can’t help but feel styling it to look like a camera itself a little sleazy on Moto’s part.

Photos from the Moto G Stylus 2026 are pretty standard for a modern mid-range Android phone. You know what to expect here: with good light, shots can look quite nice, with punchy colors, nice contrast, and good detail (provided you don’t crop or zoom). Things fall off outside of ideal conditions, though.

In medium light — I’m talking indoors, near windows, on a sunny day — the Moto G Stylus struggles to capture motion. I ended up with multiple photos of my dogs that were blurrier than I’d expected, and more than one in which Moto’s image processing rendered their moving parts as transparent (e.g., the one above where you can see the rug through my dog Leon’s leg). Taking photos in darker settings is a crapshoot.

Even in bright light, I ended up with some photos with bizarre color casts, often green or blue. The cameras sometimes flub on contrast, too, with unusually light shadows or highlights that look blown out. There’s occasional shutter lag to deal with, and Moto’s computational photography pipeline sometimes shows one frame as a preview, only to land on another frame as the final version of the photo.

In the end, I walked away with plenty of photos from the Moto G Stylus that I like quite a bit. If your priority is reliable imaging, though, you’d be better served with something like a Pixel 10a.

Battery life’s been quite good in my time with the Moto G Stylus 2026. Across a long weekend without much screen time, the phone managed to keep trucking across three days and two nights of lighter usage, totaling nearly seven hours of active use over that span. I never did manage to tap its 5,200 mAh cell in a single day, but judging by its longevity across two or more days, you could reasonably expect to get seven or even eight hours of screen on-time in a single day.

Charging is also very quick. The 2026 Moto G Stylus carries forward the previous model’s 68-watt charging ceiling. Using a compatible charger (you don’t get one in the box), I saw the phone go from 0% to full charge in under an hour. With the phone’s strong battery life and quick charging, I settled into a rhythm of plugging it in for a half our or so while I was getting ready in the morning, every other day. I never felt any battery anxiety. The phone’s 15-watt wireless charging threshold isn’t as impressive, but I think it’s perfectly reasonable.

The Moto G Stylus 2026 is a fine phone. It’s quick enough, its cameras mostly work when I need them to, and its battery life never left me wanting.

At this point, though, that’s all table stakes. There’s no shortage of phones around the G Stylus’s $500 price point that do nearly everything this phone does, often more competently. Motorola’s promise of just two Android version updates also lags behind much of the competition.

Google’s Pixel 10a ($499 at Amazon) is snappier, takes much better photos, and will receive ongoing software support into 2033. As of writing, you can get a Samsung Galaxy S25 FE ($534.99 at Samsung) for not much more than the G Stylus; that phone runs circles around this one in processing power, and Samsung’s committed to keep its software up to date through most of 2032.

While it might have some connectivity quirks, the Nothing Phone 4a Pro ($499.99 at Amazon) is another solid pick. For the same price as the G Stylus, the 4a Pro offers more horsepower, longer update support (with Android updates into 2029 and security updates into 2032), a more versatile camera setup, and more interesting hardware design.

If Moto’s active stylus has you tempted and you’re open to getting creative, with a little legwork, you can snag a used or refurbished Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra for $600 or less. That’s a bit more than the Moto G Stylus will run you, but the S24 Ultra is leagues ahead of the G Stylus in most ways, it’ll continue receive updates for years after the G Stylus’s support ends, and it comes with an active stylus.

Of course, if the combination of an SD card slot, a headphone jack, and an active stylus meets your needs perfectly, the 2026 Moto G Stylus may be your only option. It could also be an appealing pick if you’re able to get a good discount through your carrier. Again, it’s not a bad phone — but outside its unique perks, it falls short of the bar other modern mid-rangers have set in many ways.

External economic factors or not, it’s disappointing that the 2026 Moto G Stylus is nearly identical to the previous model and costs $100 more at retail. If the phone’s uncommon features are essential to you, if you can’t live without an active stylus, wired headphones, or expandable storage, you’ll probably like the Moto G Stylus 2026 just fine. For anyone else, it’s not an easy phone to recommend in the current market.