The best Android phone for gamers - Summer 2015 edition

Here at Pocket Gamer, we view smartphones a little differently to most. Sure, we're interested in how a phone looks, feels, takes photos, and sends annoying emoji. But our view is heavily affected by how well a device plays games.

So, four times a year, we're going to pick the very best Android phone you can buy for playing games.

This is a money-no-object type recommendation, and while gaming is obviously at the forefront of our thinking we're also taking other matters like camera, battery life, and design into consideration.

It's not cheap - at £560 we're talking iPhone 6 money - but it offers an incredible screen, lots of power, and and a great camera - all wrapped up in an attractive package. Which says a lot, for Samsung.

Arguably the most important component in any smartphone is its screen, and the Galaxy S6's 5.1-inch Super AMOLED display is perhaps the best in the business.

AMOLED screens are often oversaturated and unnatural looking, but Samsung has mastered the calibration process to produce accurate colours alongside the usual deep blacks.

It's tweakable, too, so you can take the edge off those vibrant colours or even bump them up another level if you so wish.

With a 2560 x 1440 'QHD' resolution, the S6 display is also extremely sharp - arguably sharper than it strictly needs to be. To place that in context, the iPhone 6 Plus's beautiful display is 1920 x 1080 - and it's half an inch bigger than the S6's too.

Excessive? Quite possibly. All we know is that this is one of the most beautiful mobile displays on the market.

With the first few QHD displays that hit the market last year, it was noticed that all those extra pixels took a big bite out of processor performance. That's far from ideal for games.

However, Samsung has fitted the Galaxy S6 with its own custom 64-bit 14nm Exynos processor, and the benchmark results simply obliterate those earlier efforts.

Essentially, this means that you get to enjoy the most demanding games without any penalty for that beautifully crisp display. It's the best of both worlds.

Once seen as a pointless gimmick, the camera has now become one of the most essential components on a smartphone for many people.

The Samsung Galaxy S6 camera is one of the best in the business. We're talking the first serious rival to the iPhone's photographic dominance for years, both in terms of image quality and point-and-shoot accessibility.

Low light performance is greatly improved over previous Samsung phones, aided by optical image stabilisation, as found on the iPhone 6 Plus.

The Samsung Galaxy S6 may be the best Android gaming phone you can buy, but it's not perfect.

Its battery life is adequate at best, with a heavy day of usage likely to see you running out of juice before bed time. Samsung has attempted to head this off with excellent wireless charging and quick-charge support.

Also, if we're talking about playing games, the Galaxy S6's single speaker is pretty weedy and prone to being covered when held in landscape view.

Finally, Samsung's TouchWiz software continues to be an unneeded and unwanted embellishment to the excellent Android 5.0 Lollipop OS that runs underneath.

We've gone for the Samsung Galaxy S6 as our definitive money-no-object choice because it has a better screen and a faster processor than pretty much every other Android phone out there. It's also got the freshest, most premium design, and arguably the best camera.

The Nexus 6 has better software thanks to the presence of its unmolested stock Android Lollipop OS, but it's an unwieldy beast with a slower processor, inferior screen, and mediocre camera.

The LG G4 matches the Galaxy S6 in many ways, with a great QHD display and an equally impressive (some might even argue slightly superior) camera. But it looks and feels cheap next to the Galaxy S6 and its Snapdragon 808 CPU isn't even the best in Qualcomm's current range, so it's hardly a match on gaming performance.

Finally we have the HTC One M9, which is a match for the Galaxy S6 in terms of pure premium build quality. It also has those great front-facing stereo speakers we mentioned elsewhere.

However, its design is very similar to last year's model, its 1080p screen hasn't really been improved at all, and there are numerous reports of its Snapdragon 810 CPU being prone to overheating during intensive tasks - hardly ideal for extended gaming sessions.