The 2024 Moto G Stylus is a $400 mid-ranger with vegan leather

Motorola’s latest phone is the 2024 Moto G Stylus 5G. For fans of pen input there isn’t much out there other than this and the Galaxy S Ultra line, but for $400 you can get a phone with a stowable stylus.

The design is just a bit interesting thanks to the “vegan leather” (that’s a type of plastic) back, which gives the phone some personality. You get flat aluminum sides, a flat screen, and a hole-punch camera. Android does not have a lot of built-in stylus features, so you’ll mostly be relying on whatever Motorola has cooked up; the website only shows a “Moto Note” app and the ability to send your drawings over instant messaging, plus there’s whatever you can find on the Play Store.

This is a mid-range phone, so for the SoC, we have a Qualcomm Snapdragon 6 Gen 1. That’s four Arm Cortex A78 cores and four Cortex A55 cores, built with a quite modern 4 nm process. There’s a 6.7-inch, 120 Hz, 2400×1080 OLED display, 8GB of RAM, 256GB of storage, and a 5000 mAh battery with 30 W wired charging and 15 W wireless charging. Pictures will come from a 50 MP main camera, 13 MP wide-angle, or a front 32 MP camera. There’s a MicroSD slot, headphone jack, in-screen fingerprint reader, stowable stylus (of course), and NFC. Wi-Fi only goes up to 802.11ac. That’s “Wi-Fi 5” and is pretty old, but it will get the job done, I guess. The “IP52” dust- and water-resistant rating is also not great, promising only protection from some water drops at certain angles.

As always, Motorola’s software update plan is a tough sell. You’ll get one major OS upgrade from Android 14 to 15. Security updates will arrive every other month for three years.

Motorola’s main business is still carrier stores and outlets like Best Buy and Walmart. Of course, it will also be at Amazon and Motorola.com. The earliest ship date for unlocked models is May 30, and for carrier stores, Motorola lists “Metro by T-Mobile, AT&T, Cricket, Boost Infinite, Boost Mobile, Consumer Cellular, UScellular, Spectrum, Xfinity Mobile, Google Fi Wireless, and Optimum Mobile, and on Straight Talk, Total by Verizon, and Visible.”