Amazon's first entry into the mobile phone market has long been viewed as a failure, but there are now signs that it will no longer sell its own branded smartphones now or in the future.

Having not listed the Fire Phone on Amazon.co.uk for quite some time, it has also been unavailable on Amazon.com since the end of August. The phone is now listed as "currently unavailable" on the US retailer's site with the addition of a line that states that Amazon doesn't "know when or if this item will be back in stock".

That is true for both the 32GB and 64GB versions of the handset. The inventory has been used up and it is strongly believed that no more stock will be produced.

And as "dozens" of Fire Phone engineers were laid off a few weeks ago, as the Wall Street Journal reported at the time, the project to build and manufacture a Fire Phone 2 is thought to have been postponed indefinitely.

In all but final confirmation, the Fire Phone is dead.

Instead, Amazon seems to be concentrating on its successful Fire tablet range, with a 6-inch tablet rumoured for pre-Christmas release priced around the $50 mark. That will no doubt do better than the Fire Phone ever did.

READ: Amazon is making a 6-inch tablet for Christmas that costs just $50