Bored with Pixel 8a? Motorola has a new Android phone that packs a stylus for $100 less

May is the month of mid-range as Google launched the Pixel 8a this week and Motorola just announced a brand new Moto G Stylus 5G (2024) releasing on May 30. 

Seen on ZDNet, the latest Moto G Stylus is a $399 Android phone with a 6.7-inch OLED display, a 5,000 mAh battery, a 32MP selfie camera and of course, that built-in stylus.

Motorola has been releasing yearly iterations of the Moto G Stylus since 2020, though its only appended the 5G into the name for the last two years. 

The 2024 version appears to be a phone of incremental upgrades in some places and a slight disappointment in some areas. The design is getting some new colors, Caramel Latte and Scarlet Wave. It also features the vegan leather rear coating that Motorola is using on all its Moto G line of phones for 2024. 

The stylus is getting slightly upgraded with reduced latency and a new stylus-specific menu to access new features like pinning favorite apps to the stylus menu. The display is now a 6.7-inch OLED, a pretty minor upgrade over last year’s 6.6-inch LCD screen. Similar to the 2023 model, it features a 120Hz refresh rate. 

Charging is also getting boosted, going from 20W to a 30-watt wired and 15W wireless charging that is new to the Moto G Stylus. The battery looks to be the same 5,000 mAh battery that was in the 2023 version.

On the camera front, the main camera appears to be the same 50MP wide angle lens that was in last year’s model. However, the ultrawide is bumping from 8MP to 13MP and the front-facing selfie camera is doubling from 16MP to 32MP.  Motorola is also promoting “UltraPixel” technology that pixel-bins four pixels into one 2µm UltraPixel. We’ll have to test it out to see how bundling pixels actually performs to see if this ends up being one of the best camera phones though. 

Storage space is about the same, featuring 256GB of storage and a slightly upgraded 8GB of RAM, compared to last year’s 6GB. That said, storage and memory is dependent on if customers purchase the phone via carrier or unlocked. The carrier model storage specs have not been released yet. The Stylus 5G does feature a microSD slot that supports up to 2TB cards. It also features a RAM Boost feature that is supposed to simulate an additional 8GB of memory.

Unfortunately, the Moto G Stylus 5G is keeping the same Qualcomm Snapdragon 6 Gen 1 (a chip that launched in 2022). It will probably handle most things just fine. However, the Pixel 8a is getting the same Tensor G3 chip the Pixel 8 and even Samsung’s mid-range phones got a slightly upgraded Exynos chips in the 1480s. 

Perhaps this is how Motorola is able to keep the price lower than Samsung and Google’s offerings while still offering improvements over last year’s model.

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