Corvettes

Little more than slower, armed shuttles, corvettes (formerly known as "rookie ships" or "noobships") are the basic frigates that new pilots start with. You can acquire a new corvette (together with a civilian weapon, a civilian mining laser and one unit of Tritanium) for free by docking your pod in a station where you don't already have any ships. On their own these are not much use for anything other than basic errand-running. EVE University has, however, been known to field fleets composed entirely of corvettes, more for their comedy value than for their effectiveness in battle.

Corvettes can be used to move around - they are better than flying just in a pod.
There are only a few other ships that have only a role bonus and no bonus based on a skill. You can fly them with minimum skills.
They are good only for the beginning of the tutorial - you should use other ships immediate when you get them and do not look back to the corvettes.
Later on, when you are experienced and working together with people who fly capital ships, you can use corvettes as cheap Cyno ships and fit a Cyno Field Generator I on it, together with an afterburner. But you may need to fit powergrid or cpu enhancement modules as well to have enough power and cpu grid to support both modules.

All four corvettes can carry at least one light drone in their dronebay. The Gallente Velator can carry two.