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iPhone's various applications ("widgets") are mostly covered in our FAQ and on Apple's web pages, but we do have a few notes on them:

The Weather and Stock widgets are simple, easy to use, and very like their Mac OS X Dashboard counterparts. They are ideal applications for low-bandwidth networks such as EDGE: they fetch conveniently small amounts of data, and display them with locally stored graphics and styles.

Calendar is basic. It doesn't support to-do items, and although it can sync many calendars from iTunes, it doesn't provide color coding or other differentiation. You can edit your own events, but not those of subscribed calendars. Unlike the iCal it is clearly modeled on, you cannot adjust events by dragging them in Day view; this view just doesn't do much. Calendar's List view is very handy, and more useful than the Day view. Traditional PDA users will not be impressed with Calendar; it appears to have been designed more as a quick reference tool than an organizer.

Camera is fun to use, with a visual shutter effect that fills in the time that iPhone spends processing and saving the picture as a JPEG. Image quality is surprisingly good, depending on lighting conditions (see our Flickr gallery of sample photos). When iPhone is docked, iTunes starts up iPhoto or Aperture for importing.

YouTube is another fun little application. Although YouTube's library of content available to iPhone (and Apple TV) is limited at the moment, the whole catalog will be available by Autumn. You can bookmark favorite videos, but you can't log in to YouTube to access your existing Favorites the way you can on Apple TV.

Integration is good; if you receive an email with a YouTube link, Mail passes it to the YouTube widget instead of Safari (which does not support embedded video, Flash or otherwise).

iPhone's SMS capability provides text messaging with other mobile phones (text only, no photos, movies or sounds). It is styled similarly to iChat, but isn't Internet-based like iChat. SMS messages are sent over mobile phone networks, and typically incur fees or require a paid service plan. The iPhone plan includes 200 messages. You pay for both sent and received messages; a single conversation can rapidly consume this quota. After that, AT&T charges $0.15 per text message (or sells add-ons to your service plan).

The Notes widget is the odd man out on iPhone. Every other application uses the classic Helvetica face for text, but Notes uses Marker Felt. Deleting a note is handled inside a note object, instead of in the list view like every other iPhone tool. There is no provision for syncing Notes with your Mac or PC, but you can turn a Note into an email message. It's a nice enough little tool, but it doesn't feel like it was designed to run on the same device as the other programs.