Amazon Kindle Fire tablet lands at $200

Amazon's Kindle Fire tablet has been unveiled as a 7in Android-based tablet, at an astonishingly low price of $US199 ($A203).

The long-awaited device, unveiled in New York on Wednesday, ships 15 November with preorders starting immediately. Amazon said it won't be available outside the US.

Amazon also unveiled an update to its Kindle ebook reader line-up - click here for the full details.

It features a dual-core processor and 8GB of storage, Gorilla Glass IPS display, and weighs 14.6 ounces. Amazon promises battery life of eight hours when reading or 7.5 hours if playing video.

A demo from CEO Jeff Bezos suggested it supports multitasking. It will not come with 3G, limiting users to Wi-Fi. It also doesn't have a camera or a microphone, according to reports.

While it is based on Android, that has been overlaid with Amazon's own UI linked to the online retailer's content collection. Apps will be quality tested to ensure they work on the Amazon UI, the company said, and the device comes with an email client built in.

The Kindle Fire comes with a free 30-day trial of Amazon's Prime, which now includes streaming video.

The company's Whispersync - which keeps track of which page of a book you're on, if you flip to a different device - has been extended to film and TV shows, letting users switch from the tablet to their TV, for example, without having to find the same spot in their show again - although it wasn't clear exactly how that would work.

Bezos said the device ties together Amazon's cloud, content services, Kindle platform and retail experience. Everything on the Fire will automatically be backed up to the cloud, so users can delete it from the tablet without losing it completely.

Along with that, Bezos unveiled Amazon Silk, a "cloud-acclerated" mobile browser system for the Fire. It uses "Dynamic Split Browsing" to optimise content in the cloud before sending it down to the device, to boost how quickly pages load.