Apple has taken the unprecedented step of announcing iOS 5 feature before the main keynote of its WWDC conference in San Francisco.

This follows in the footsteps of the conference announcement, which unusually detailed the topics that Apple CEO Steve Jobs would discuss at the event. The hotly-anticipated iCloud experience will be unveiled at the event, along with the iOS 5 features detailed below, which will be given their first public airing.

The main features coming up in iOS 5, according to Apple, along with our analysis of what they all mean:

This is the iPhone app for RenRen – looks a little familiar, no?

I’m just going to say this – the point of me writing this review is that you go and download the Beluga app for your iPhone or Android device right now. Not because someone can give me some dollars (coz that would be nice) but because for the first time in many years I see an application that could possibly just change things on a scale bigger than Twitter and Facebook.

No light words, there. But Beluga is an application unlike any other that I have seen. While it seems simple on the outside, I think it has some kind of power to do something great and get rid of SMS, and Facebook for good. But it’s not just me – Louis Gray and MG Siegler have been waxing lyrical about it too.

So what does this app actually do that makes it so cool?

I was thinking the other day about how I use the iPad, Nexus One, netbook, MacBook, desktop PC and so on together. I found it strange how I could accept iOS 3′s restrictions on the iPad, but when I tried to use an iPhone I found myself constantly annoyed about being unable to perform the various tasks I wanted to do.

iPad Unboxing

I suspect what it comes down to is the fact that I expect my mobile phone to perform a lot of tasks – and in many ways, I have been spoilt by the Nexus One allowing me to do pretty much anything I could ever want it to. However with the iPad, there is no precedent – there hasn’t really been a truly widespread tablet of this kind before, so coming in to it makes it a new experience.

Nexus One

Sure, it isn’t without its annoyances here and there when things go horribly wrong (and hopefully iOS 4 will go some way to address that); but I still think the iPad user experience is managed and what I would expect it to be.

Seesmic, the popular Twitter, Facebook and Buzz client previously available for Windows, Web, Android, Blackberry, and a whole pile of other platforms, has recently made its iPhone application available.

Many questioned whether there would be any point in Seesmic releasing an iPhone app, with the recent news and release of Twitter for iPhone, a rebrand of the extremely popular Tweetie application.

But surprisingly, the application has received critical acclaim.

By implementing more than one platform, and combining this with an innovative multi-panel interface for quick and easy navigation, Seesmic for iPhone is similarly pitched to Seesmic for Android – for the power users who want to get the most out of their device while they’re on the go.

Check out some screenshots of Seesmic for iPhone in action below.