Motorola’s mid-range Moto G 5G smartphone is now on sale for a budget price. If you’re looking for an unlocked phone that doesn’t cost a fortune, here’s a deal your wallet will thank you for. Currently, Amazon offers the unlocked Moto G 5G for just $179.99. This phone typically costs $$299.99, so that’s $180 in savings or 40% off. The Moto G Stylus is a modestly sized device that might be a bit too big for smaller hands.
That’s not a big deal, though, since you’re more likely to use the stylus with this phone, and it requires ambidextrous operation anyway. We can only think of one word to describe how the Moto G Stylus feels: cheap. We are used to plastic phones when we look at phones that cost less than $400, but where devices like the Pixel 5a (and the Pixel 4a before it) use a higher-quality, unobjectionable material, it seems like Motorola used the cheapest, shiniest plastic on this phone. At least it doesn’t creak when you touch it.
We also find the juxtaposition between the cheap design of the phone and the surprisingly solid stylus quite confusing. The stylus sits in its own silo buried in the phone. Unlike the Moto G Stylus 5G, which required you to wrap the nail around a lip to release it, the stylus uses a Samsung-style plunger to secure itself inside the phone. We like this change, and we found that the stylus here was easier to remove than the S Pen on the Galaxy S22 Ultra perhaps the only comparison to Samsung’s flagship that the budget Moto G Stylus can win.
Motorola’s stylus is a solid piece of metal with a soft tip that glides well across the display. As mentioned earlier, the 6.8-inch display of the Moto G Stylus is significantly larger than the 6.4-inch display of its predecessor, although it is still an LCD screen with Full HD resolution. Not much has changed, but it is still a high-quality display that is sharp and can display vivid colors. The screen of the G Stylus was comparatively darker, but that is to be expected for an LCD screen.
The Moto G Stylus still has a hole in the upper left corner of the display for the selfie camera, and given the larger size of the screen, the hole actually obstructs less viewing area than the hole on last year’s G Stylus. The new Moto G Stylus hasn’t changed much in terms of the triple camera setup on the back that was present on its predecessor, with a 48-MP main shooter, an 8-MP ultra-wide lens, and a 2-MP macro camera, as well as a 16-MP selfie shooter.
The phone’s 48MP main camera is the standout, delivering good clarity and balanced colors for casual daylight shots. In low-light conditions, the quality drops a bit and dark colors fade into black or dark brown spots. This low-light performance is a bit worse on the ultra-wide-angle camera, which also doesn’t deliver as sharp photos – understandable given the lower megapixel count – but it’s still a helpful alternative in daylight when you want more subjects and landscapes in the frame. In the absence of a telephoto lens, the phone’s digital zoom will suffice, capturing blurry textures at the maximum 8.8x magnification.