Amazon is working on a smartphone - Kindle-branded, presumably - to take on Apple and Samsung, it has been claimed.

Two moles have stepped up to spill the beans. One says Amazon is working with contract manufacturer Foxconn, news agency Bloomberg reports.

The other source says that the online retailer is quietly licensing the intellectual property it needs to avoid the legal entanglements that are currenty tying up its would-be rivals.

Amazon itself is keeping mum, but rumours that it is working on a phone have surfaced before.

Then, as now, details are scarce, but the move is a logical extension of Amazon's existing tablet strategy.

But it's also worth considering that, these days, phones are getting larger and there's no much difference between a big phone and a small tablet, especially if the latter has 3G or LTE technology on board, as some Kindles already do, to facilite content downloads on the go.

So what some moles might dub a smartphone may be a smaller tablet, part of a plan by Amazon to make Kindles available in whatever form-factors folk want. ®