Yesterday Apple dropped the secrecy so long associated with their annual World Wide Developers Conference (WWDC) and pre-announced some of the things they'll be covering at this years show.  Among them was the next generation iPhone OS, iOS5.  So what can we expect from the next iteration of Apple's key mobile operating system?

Games

Improved graphics performance is a fairly obvious one.  Apple's iPhone and iPod touch have become an unlikely but incredibly popular gaming platform for casual gamers, moving in on territory traditionally held by Sony and Nintendo.  Games are also a good reason people buy iPhones over competing products so Apple will want to bolster this trend, improved graphic support is an obvious way of doing this, keeping the competition one step behind.

Social

Improved built in support for social networking, in particular Twitter.  Apple wants the iPhone to be the centre of your digital life, so the easier it can make it for you to post things to Facebook, Twitter and YouTube the more likely you are to just use your phone rather than resorting to your PC.  They want to make it so easy you don't even think about it, so that it then starts to become a chore when using competing products to do the same sorts of things.  In the same way Apple brought easy-to-use brainless instant maps functionality to smart phones with the first iPhone, they are trying to do the same with social networking.

iCloud

Apple also announced iCloud yesterday which by all accounts will be a cloud based service for hosting your music and videos so you can access them from anywhere rather than being limited to having them stored locally in your own iTunes library on your computer.  Its logical that Apple will add new hooks for this service in to iOS allowing you to access your iCloud library from your phone, anywhere and at any time.  Apple may also choose to deliver games and apps this way as well, allowing you to update, sync and remove your apps over-the-air.

Over-The-Air Updates

Talking about over-the-air, its long been rumoured that Apple will introduce over-the-air OS updates for iOS devices removing the need to connect them to your computer and update them through iTunes.

Notifications

There is a persistent rumour that Apple will add a much improved notifications system to iOS.  Apple is acknowledge as having one of the worst notification systems in the smart phone market so this is definitely somewhere they can improve.

For Developers

Under the hood, Apple will almost certainly continue its dizzying strategy of adding to and improving the iOS and CocoaTouch programming API's allowing developers to create better apps and games more quickly and easily.  I suspect they will focus on adding APIs for iCloud, improved Game Center APIs and better multitasking/background processes support.  Apple will apparently also enable support for iPhone widgets (widgets are light-weight applications, usually built in javascript and HTML) making it easier to build simple focussed single screen apps like the Weather and Stocks apps.  Given that iAds already use the same sorts of technology its not difficult to believe.

I've just scratched the surface the rumour mill here but if even half of these things happen then it'll make iOS5 a must-have update!