Leaflets: One-Stop Shop for iPhone Apps

The cool widget-like icons sitting in the iPhone's main menu glisten with possibility—but for now, at least, you can't add, remove, or tweak them in any way (well, not officially, at least). Enter Leaflets, an impressive new iPhone app that gives you a sneak peek at how the iPhone's widgets will probably work in the near future.

Leaflets are essentially mini iPhone apps that run over the mobile Safari browser, and the slick Leaflets portal (just point Safari to getleaflets.com) mimics the look and feel of the iPhone's icon-driven main screen. The beta version of the app includes Leaflets for Web search, RSS feeds, Flickr, Newsvine (a portal for the latest news headlines), the New York Times, social bookmarking site del.icio.us, and a listing of other on-the-Web iPhone apps. The presentation of the Leaflets themselves is pretty slick; a navigation bar along the top of the Safari screen makes it easy to return to the main screen, and jumping from one Leaflet to the next was relatively smooth over AT&T's EDGE network.

If you're curious about the growing number of iPhone apps out there, Leaflets is a great way to start; by the same token, it'll also whet your appetite for actual, downloadable iPhone widgets, once they finally arrive.

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GetLeaflets: Must-Have iPhone App [TechCrunch]