The Moto G Stylus Waterproof Review

The Moto G Stylus Waterproof is the latest addition to Motorola’s budget stylus-equipped smartphone family. It offers a great combination of performance, battery life, and features at an affordable price.

The phone has a large screen, fast performance, and long battery life. It also has a solid camera and supports 5G connectivity.

Camera

The Moto G Stylus Waterproof is a good choice for people who want a modern, fast, and affordable phone that’s also waterproof. It has an excellent display, better battery life than its predecessor, and some helpful Motorola-style customizations like Moto Gametime to help reduce gaming distractions.

The camera isn’t the most exciting of its class, but it does a pretty good job at what it does. It offers a quad-array of rear cameras with a 48MP primary sensor, an 8MP ultrawide, a 5MP macro, and a 2MP depth sensor.

The primary sensor can capture up to 1080p 30fps video, while the rest of the camera pod tops out at 4k 30fps. The video results are decent, but the lack of autofocus and stabilizer means you’ll have to take many pictures to get a decent one.

Battery

The Moto G Stylus Waterproof is an attractive budget phone worth checking out if you want a stylus-equipped device. While it won’t match the Galaxy Note 20 or Samsung’s Galaxy S21 Ultra in terms of performance, it still offers good value for money.

A MediaTek Helio G88 processor powers it with 6GB of RAM and 128GB of storage. It also supports fast charging.

Motorola promises a 5,000-milliamp-hour battery in the Moto G Stylus Waterproof, which is enough to power through two days of everyday use. It’s not the kind of battery you’d want to rely on all the time.

Performance

The $399 Moto G Stylus Waterproof is a productivity-focused smartphone with much to offer. It has 256GB of storage, 5G connectivity, and a 6.8-inch display.

The G Stylus Waterproof’s performance is solid enough for most tasks, especially when compared to Samsung’s Galaxy Note 10 and LG’s Stylo 5.

It runs Android 12 on a Snapdragon 480 processor and 6GB of memory. It’s also available in a smaller model with 4GB and 128GB of storage.

One of the standout features of the Moto G Stylus Waterproof is its stylus, which can be used for jotting down notes or sketching designs. Motorola has tuned its software to make it easy for users to take advantage of all the stylus’s functionality without much prior knowledge or expertise.

Software

Motorola’s annual upgrade to its budget line of phones, the Moto G Stylus Waterproof, is a decent pick for anyone looking for a large phone with a built-in stylus. It’s a few hundred dollars cheaper than Samsung’s Galaxy S22 Ultra and has a vast screen and long battery life.

The primary camera is a 48-megapixel sensor with pixel binning to reduce noise in low-light photos. It also has an 8-megapixel ultrawide camera and a 16-megapixel selfie cam.

One of the significant differences between this version and its predecessor is that the Moto G Stylus Waterproof isn’t just an LTE-only device; it offers 5G connectivity, too. It’s also a bit better overall, with more RAM and storage, an improved processor, a faster display, and NFC support (!).

Design

Motorola’s latest budget-friendly device, the Moto G Stylus Waterproof, follows a trend we’ve seen on past devices: skipping glossy finishes in favor of anti-fingerprint ones. While that’s a good idea in general, the polished blue finish on our Steel Blue model collects a lot of fingerprints, which is a big turnoff.

The device also lacks an IP rating for dust or water resistance, though it was able to handle a couple of water drops that I intentionally poured on it.

The built-in stylus is helpful but not as feature-packed as Samsung’s S Pen. In addition, it doesn’t have Bluetooth connectivity or support for extra functions like a button to activate secondary actions, so it’s not as valuable a tool as it could be.