Palm accidentally leaked an early edition of WebOS 1.2 and has ended up showing a beta of the next version of its smartphone operating system to the great unwashed.

There is some good things in it too. One thing that has been spotted is the operating system might start using the LEDs that a built into the Pre to notify users of events, like new emails. For ages users have been moaning about the lack of this feature. With this feature, the LEDs that are on both sides of the Gesture Area will blink to notify users of events. Users will have the option to turn this on or off. But strangely the pre-release version of WebOS 1.2 has this feature completely disabled, and it's not clear if it will be part of the shipping version.

More scarily there appears to be a function in the operating system that will allow Palm to remotely remove software from users' devices. All that will be left is a message which says “Palm had to delete this application from the App Catalogue and your device. If you paid for this app, your money will be refunded.”

Obviously Palm has not learnt much from the incident where Amazon deleted books from user's Kindles and the outcry that caused. It's not known when Palm will release WebOS 1.2. It's possible the company itself doesn't know exactly when it will happen, and simply intends will start pushing it out to user's smartphones when the work on it is complete.