If you ever want to know when Nikon will announce another DSLR, just look at my travel schedule. Virtually every Nikon announcement seems to come while I'm on the road, and the D3200 announcement last week was no exception.
The low-end DSLR body has come a long way since the D50 introduction in 2005. From the humble class-trailing 6mp and 10mp D50, D40, D40x, D60, and D3000 versions, we've now catapulted up to a class leading 24mp entry body. With a kit price (with 18-55mm lens) of US$700, the D3200 becomes the Nikon DX body with the most pixels (6016x4000, which is another odd masking choice by Nikon).
D3000 and D3100 users will find a lot hasn't changed. Most of the external body and basic functions are unchanged. What has changed is this: (1) 24mp sensor (not Sony supplied it appears); (2) new video capabilities (1080P/24/25/30, 720P/50/60); (3) EXPEED 3 image processing; (4) optional (US$60) WU-1a WiFi capability; and (5) the 3" LCD is now 921k dots. Other changes include a slight bump to frames per second (to 4) plus some modest menu updates.
The camera will be available in late April, with the WiFi adapter following a month later. The WiFi adapter will ship with an Android (2.3 or later) app for controlling and transferring images, with iOS support to come later. Given Nikon's historic inability to keep up with multiple, iterating operating systems, I'm a little leery of the Android-first approach. I expect a lot of footnotes in their support documents.
It's clear that WiFi is coming to virtually all cameras, even DSLRs, in the near future. This is happening with either built-in (as with the recent Samsung mirrorless camera announcements) or external options (as with the D3200's dedicated WiFi controller and the D800's Eye-Fi card support). The question is whether the camera companies actually understand what users want and can create a simple, integrated workflow. The lack of details coming from Nikon on the WU-1a aren't promising in that respect. Unfortunately, it looks as if we're once again entering the land of everyone-doing-it-themselves-in-some-proprietary manner.
The problem for users (remember them, they're the ones buying the products, guys), is that there are three entities in the workflow that are now in constant change: the hardware (camera and its connectivity), the media hub (iPhoto, Lightroom, View NX2, etc.), and the ultimate destination (cloud, Facebook, Flickr, myPictureTown, etc.).
Nikon obviously wants to play in all these areas (witness the WU-1a, View NX2, and myPictureTown), but frankly, they're not nearly close to state-of-the-art in any of them, which produces a kludgy, unsatisfactory sum of the parts. Moreover, because they want to own the whole workflow, it's unlikely that they'll cooperate closely with others with a similar goal (e.g. Adobe). I'll just go out on a limb here and predict that while the WU-1a may be popular, it won't be used in the way Nikon expects and most of us will find the software support lacking in some way. Let's hope that some enterprising entrepreneur gets in there and develops the software to do the right things for users.