The Palm Solutions Group today announced a major breakthrough for Palm OS handhelds, the ability for those devices to support a seven fold increase in memory from the current 16MB to 128MB of RAM.

"The range of potential next-generation hardware and software solutions expands tremendously with this innovation from Palm Solutions engineers," said Steve Manser, senior vice president of product development for Palm Solutions Group. "Our memory advance means customers can be confident they'll have what they need to deploy robust business applications or rich multimedia."

According to the company, the memory breakthrough has been incorporated into the Palm OS by PalmSource. Expect this announcement to give Palm a boost in its competition against the Pocket PC. Though it dominates the PDA market, a maximum of 16MB of memory began to appear a bit dated when compared to Pocket PCs that offered two to four times that amount of RAM.

We'll be sure to let you know when the first devices that take advantage of the increased memory capacities are announced.