According to the Korean news website ETNews, Samsung has announced that they’re going to merge their mobile devices division with their camera division. The exact details about the merger aren’t available, other than a sentence that says the company’s goal is to “integrate the technical know-how of the two business divisions into competency for differentiating our smartphones.”

You’d think that Samsung’s digital camera team would already be working on the cameras inside Samsung’s smartphones, but that’s not really the case. Whereas a Sony Xperia’s camera has the same UI and UX as a Sony point-and-shoot, Samsung’s phones couldn’t be more different than Samsung’s cameras. Here’s hoping the camera guys actually win, because Samsung’s smartphone camera UI is terrible.

Now about that headline, I whacked a stick against a hornet’s nest for a reason. Every tech reviewer, when discussing any smartphone camera, comes to the same conclusion: Apple’s phones offer the best image quality. That’s not to say Samsung’s phones have crappy cameras, they’re really good, but Apple’s are just that tiny fraction better.

Can this merger close the gap?

And then there’s the camera division itself. What are they going to learn from the phone guys? How to put Android inside a DSLR? Oh wait, that was the Galaxy NX, and it flopped. but hey, maybe, just maybe, Samsung might the first company to come up with a “connected camera” that’s actually worth buying? They’ve obviously been iterating hard, with the Galaxy Camera and then the Galaxy Zoom, so the hunger is there.

Watch this space, because it’s going to get a hell of a lot more interesting.