Moto G Stylus (2026) review

Android 16 with Hello UI

The Moto G Stylus (2026) boots Android 16 with the proprietary Hello UI on top of it. And if you have used any recent Motorola, you will feel right at home with the G Stylus (2026). You can check out our Hello UI/Moto AI video, which we did earlier this year for Edge 60, to get a general feel for it.

Motorola only promises two OS updates and three years of security updates with the Moto G series, which is a bit behind the competition, even in the budget space.

All important customizations live in the usual Moto app 'hub'. Things are neatly organized, with the categories that have a lot of entries. There are some cool predefined themes, too.

Hello UI

Smart Connect (previously Ready For) is the combined name for the features that involve connecting the phone to a PC, tablet, or standalone displays, be it wired or wirelessly. Streaming, mobile desktop, phone to PC, smart sharing, smart clipboard, cross control and more - all features are here under one roof. We remind you, however, that there is no direct video output over USB Alt mode from the Type-C port here.

The Smart Connect app is where you would also pair your Moto buds, watch, VR, and tags.

Smart Connect

Moto does AI differently from other manufacturers. You actually have the choice of several different AI models here on one device. That said, Moto's own Moto AI, as seen on the Edge series, seems to be missing from the Moto G Stylus (2026). This is likely due to hardware limitations, as Moto AI is, at least in large part, executed on the device itself.

Still, there is no shortage of pre-installed AI tools. Google's Gemini is here, along with Circle to search. If Gemini doesn't tickle your fancy, there are Copilot and Perplexity, both pre-installed. That said, unlike the Edge series, there is no dedicated AI button, and you seemingly can't set an AI assistant to the double-tap the back side gesture.

Google AI

Not surprisingly, some other AI-driven Moto features are also missing from the Moto G Stylus (2026) - things like Catch me up, Image Studio, Playlist Studio and Pay Attention.

On the flip side, you do still get a whole load of customizable gestures. Double-tapping the back of the phone triggers Quick Launch. You can set it to open a specific app, start/stop music playback, or go back to the homescreen or the last used app, among others.

As usual, Motorola's UI also offers several other unique physical shortcuts like this, including the karate chop to toggle the flashlight and the quick wrist twist to start the camera.

Gestures

Finally, and most importantly, let's talk about the stylus features.

The most notable update this year on the Moto G Stylus is, well, the stylus itself. It is now an active stylus with a capacitor battery that recharges inside the bed. Thanks to the active connection to the Moto, the stylus offers a functional button on the stylus stem (single press, long press), it supports hover and tilt/pressure recognition, and it gets better accuracy and lower input lag.

We can confirm that writing and drawing with the stylus is great, hassle-free, and feels like zero lag.

Hover is recognized everywhere, and you can use the Hover to Zoom functionality.

Pressure sensitivity allows for bolder text, while tilting should be able to turn into thicker lines for easier shading, though admittedly, that didn't work in the Notes app.

When you remove the stylus from the phone, you get a floating menu with customizable options - open a new note, take a screenshot to write on (annotate), zoom, sketch to image. You can add or remove apps and settings from this menu, which is handy.

Stylus options

Taking notes is super easy, and the screen and the stylus are nicely responsive. Converting the handwritten text to machine text is almost flawless, too.

We also found the handwriting calculator quite handy. It supports quite advanced calculations, including integrals. To use this calculator, you need to be in Notes – Drawing mode. It does not do calculations when in the note-taking mode.

The Annotate option (crop and write from the screen) is neat, too, and it will probably be one of the most used stylus functions.

Anotate • Handwriting calculator • Note taking

The Sketch-to-image feature uses AI to create pictures from your odd drawings. And it works surprisingly well!

Sketch to image

Performance and benchmarks

The Moto G Stylus (2026) is powered by the Snapdragon 6 Gen 3 chip, the same one inside the Moto G Stylus (2025). The only hardware updates are the storage and the RAM - the new model UFS 3.1 chips, up from UFS 2.2, and LPDDR5 RAM, up from LPDDR4X.

The Snapdragon 6 Gen 3 CPU setup is well known and it has two clusters - four ARM Cortex-A78 cores, clocked at up to 2.4 GHz (up from 2.2GHz) and another four Cortex-A55 ones, working at up to 1.8 GHz. The onboard GPU is an Adreno 710.

The Moto G Stylus (2026) is available in two storage configurations - 128GB and 256GB, both packing 8GB LPDDR5 RAM.

And now, here are some benchmarks.

Unfortunately, the Moto G Stylus (2026) scores are at the bottom of the charts as its chip is outdated. Still, even if not a benchmark scorer, the phone provides incredibly smooth performance across the OS and most apps.

Having a basic chip pretty much guarantees excellent sustained performance, and that's the case with the Moto G Stylus (2026), too. The Moto scored 89% on the CPU and 99% on the GPU stress tests.

CPU test • GPU test