Moto G Stylus (2025) Turns a Budget Flagship Phone Into a Daily Note Taker You Can Live With

Motorola still sells the only widely available Android phone in this price range that keeps a real pen tucked in the frame, and the Moto G Stylus (2025), priced at $279.99 (was $400), uses that old idea as the excuse for a much sharper everyday phone. You get a 6.7-inch pOLED panel, IP68 sealing, 68W wired charging, 15W wireless charging, a microSD slot, a 3.5mm headphone jack, and a Snapdragon 6 Gen 3 chip in a 191-gram slab that measures about 0.33 x 2.94 x 6.38 inches.

The visual appearance is driven by two unique Pantone blues, one of which (this one) is named ‘Surf the Web’ and is a bit brighter and more cobalt, with a vegan leather back that provides some much-needed grip to the plastic frame. Corning Gorilla Glass 3 protects the front. Motorla claims it has been tested to MIL-STD-810H specifications for shock, temperature, humidity, and altitude. This won’t make this gadget fully impenetrable, but it gives it an advantage over last year’s G Stylus on paper. You will withdraw the stylus from the bottom edge, and a small click will indicate that it is in place.

This phone’s screen time is handled by a Super HD pOLED display that measures 2712 by 1220 pixels, or around 444 pixels per inch, and features adaptive refresh up to 120Hz, HDR, and a reported 3000-nit peak. Colors are brilliant, outside brightness is tolerable, and video appears to be just what a mid-range flagship should look like. The sound is provided by dual stereo speakers with Dolby Atmos, while the 3.5mm jack remains at the bottom, with USB-C, the mic, a speaker grill, and the pen bed. There aren’t many phones that charge wirelessly and still have a 3.5mm connector.

The stylus is the main reason this phone was created. Motorla claims the new 2025 pen responds 6.4 times faster than the previous one. When you pull it out, a floating menu appears with options to create a new note, snap a screenshot, freeform crop a photo, create a GIF, and use a handwritten calculator. Locked screen notes open instantaneously and are commonly used in grocery lines or meetings. For lists, markup, and short sketches, especially when you only need to scribble down some ideas, a pen still rules over a fingertip. Storage is 256GB UFS 2.2 with a dedicated microSD card with a capacity of up to 1TB, as well as a RAM boost if you need more space to run apps properly.

Its Snapdragon 6 Gen 3 runs on a 4nm technology and features four Cortex-A78 cores that can reach 2.4GHz and four Cortex-A55 cores that can reach 1.8GHz, as well as an Adreno 710 GPU. This is adequate for navigation, some camera work, social apps, and light gaming. Benchmarks are mid-range at best, heat is manageable, and daily use seems far smoother than the chip’s moniker implies. The software is Android 15 with Motorola’s Hello UI, as well as the usual suspects such as NFC, Bluetooth 5.4, Wi-Fi 6E, 5G, nano-SIM and eSIM support, an on-screen fingerprint scanner, and face unlock.