Moto G Stylus (2025) The Moto G Stylus (2025) feels like Motorola pulled together almost everything that's worked about its best budget phones and put it into one device. It charges quickly, performs well, and comes with a built-in stylus that's way easier than drawing with a fingertip. I'm begging for longer update support, but otherwise, this is a great cheap Android phone.
Motorola’s budget lineup has been through some tricky evolutions over the years. It’s added and removed options on both ends, from one-off experiments with the ultra-cheap Moto G Pure, to the Moto G Stylus and Moto G Power continually trading places as the top option. Sometimes, it means there’s a cheap Motorola device for everyone, but it often leaves me confused about which one to recommend. Not anymore.
The $400 Moto G Stylus (2025) is the easiest cheap Motorola phone to recommend, and here’s why.
All dressed up in blue
Ryan Haines / Android Authority
Along with Motorola’s uncertainty over how to space its budget Android phones, it’s undergone several design swings over the years. When I started reviewing phones, Motorola was all about vibrant colors with centrally placed camera bumps. I loved almost all of them because they made otherwise cheap phones look and feel more exciting. Then, it seemed like Motorola was content to roll out gray rectangle after gray rectangle, complete with corner-mounted cameras that looked like most other budget-minded Android phones. That mentality seeped out into the mid-range and flagship Edge launches, too, which had me worried about what the future of my favorite Moto designs would look like.
Recently, though, Motorola has rediscovered its fun roots. It’s jumped headfirst back into vibrant Pantone colors across all price points, from the top-end Razr Ultra down to the most affordable, and outright bad Moto G (2025). For the 2025 iteration of the Moto G Stylus (there’s only one model this year, so no LTE-only confusion), that means a duo of beautiful blue shades, Gibraltar Sea and Surf The Web, both with vegan leather back panels. I’m glad Motorola sent me Surf The Web, as it’s a bit more of a royal blue than the Gibraltar Sea’s navy blue, but I’d take either one over the muted grays and pale purples that Samsung likes to roll out at this price point.
Motorola's partnership with Pantone is making cheap phones fun again.
It’s not just the change in color preferences that’s swept Motorola’s recent lineups, though — I think its Moto G designs look better than ever, too. Yes, they’re all at least somewhat inspired by the new Motorola Edge blueprints in the same way that Samsung’s Galaxy A series pulls right from the Galaxy S25 trio, but I think it works out a bit better in Motorola’s favor. Where Samsung’s cheap phones tend to look pretty generic with their simple camera cutouts, the Moto G Stylus could fall anywhere in Motorola’s range, from being the cheap phone it is to tricking you into thinking it’s a flagship Edge device.
Outside of the general plastic-ness of the Moto G Stylus, the slow, steady improvement in build quality would almost make you think it’s an Edge device, too. In the past, some of Motorola’s budget offerings have had issues with some flex to the back panels, but I haven’t noticed any of that here. The plastic frame is also rigid enough for me to continue using the phone without a case, though I might imagine that combining a MIL-STD 810H rating against drops and IP68 certification for water and dust adds to some of my budget peace of mind.
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