In February last year, we got the Moto G Stylus, a phone from Motorola featuring a built-in stylus. It wasn’t the same feature-rich stylus as we see in the Note series from Samsung but rather a basic stylus. Well, today, we got the Moto G Stylus 2021, which, as the name suggests, is a successor to the last year’s phone. The upgrades? The new version offers better performance, a bigger display, an extra camera on the rear, etc. Interestingly, the price of the 2021 version is the same as the price of Moto G Stylus 2020 when it launched last year, i.e., $299.
The biggest design change is there on the rear as the new version has a rectangular camera module that has the Quad camera setup in it. The 2020 version had a vertically stacked triple camera array. The front design remains the same, so there is a circular cutout on the top left corner where the selfie camera is placed. The USB Type-C port is there on the bottom, and on the left of it, there is the 3.5mm headphone jack, while on the right of it is the place to keep the stylus. There is now a push-pen stylus, so the design is similar to that of an S-Pen. The fingerprint scanner, this time, is on the side and not on the rear.
Moto G Stylus 2021 has a huge 6.8-inch display, and it is an LCD panel with Full-HD+ resolution and a normal 60Hz refresh rate. Under the hood, there is the Qualcomm Snapdragon 678 SOC, which was announced last year in December by Qualcomm. It is not a 5G chipset and is an upgrade over the Snapdragon 675. The only major difference between it and the Snapdragon 675 is that the Snapdragon 678 has Kryo 460 CPU with a higher 2.2GHz clock speed than 2.0GHz in the case of the 675. Anyway, this is definitely a big performance upgrade since the Moto G Stylus 2020 had the Snapdragon 665.
There is 4GB RAM and 128GB storage that is expandable. The battery size and the charging speed remain unchanged, so there is a 4,000mAh cell and 10W charging support.
On the rear, Moto G Stylus 2021 has a Quad camera setup. Hence, there is a primary 48 Megapixel camera paired with an 8 Megapixel ultrawide camera, a 2 Megapixel macro camera, and a 2 Megapixel depth sensor. For comparison, the Moto G Stylus 2020 offered a 16 Megapixel ultrawide Action Cam along with a 2 Megapixel macro camera. So the camera setup on the Moto G Stylus 2021 seems more like a downgrade than an upgrade. On the front, there is a 16 Megapixel camera.
Another downgrade is in the audio department. There is a single front-firing speaker on this phone compared to the stereo speaker setup on the last year’s version.
Finally, Android 10 runs out of the box.
Moto G Stylus 2021 comes in two colors named Aurora Black & Aurora White. There is only one storage option, and the price is $299.99. The phone is currently up for pre-order in the US via Motorola’s website, and the shipping will start on the 13th of January.