The Iomega Superhero Backup and Charger ($69.99 list) represents a simple idea. Serving as a charging dock and an offline backup system for your iPhone or iPod touch, it's too simple, in fact. This $70 dock can charge your iPhone and back up your contacts and photos, but you can't use it to sync with your computer since there's no USB port. Unless you desperately need PC-free backup, you're better off with a product like the Kensington PowerLift Battery and Dock ($49.99, 4 stars), a much smaller (and cheaper) dock that not only charges over USB, but serves as a back-up battery for your iPhone (4, 3G, 3GS, or 4th generation iPod Touch). Iomega claims it's a great way to back up your contacts and photos in case your iPhone is lost or stolen, but it really doesn't do it any better than your computer and iTunes.

Design
The Superhero is a simple, silver, rounded metal square measuring 0.8 by 3.5 by 3.5 inches (HWD) and weighing 4.8 ounces. It's only slightly smaller than the Apple TV. The back side of the dock houses an SD/SDHC card slot and a port for the AC adapter. There's no USB connector, which is a glaring omission, one that effectively destroys the utility of the dock. If you use the Superhero as your main charging dock, you'll have to search for your USB cable (and un-dock the iPhone) every time you want to sync with your computer. If you use it as a travel charging dock, you'll have to plug in the AC adapter every time you want to give your phone a boost. In the box, you'll find the dock itself, an AC adapter, and a 4GB SD card. The storage is entirely SD card-based, so you can use a larger card if you need to. On the other hand, this means the dock is only an expensive iPhone charging cradle without an SD card.

Backing up contacts and photos requires the free Superhero app, which is available in the App Store, and is activated on the iPhone itself. By default, the Superhero app will automatically begin backing up the phone 30 seconds after you sit it in the dock. Once it begins backing up your data, though, you need to leave it alone while it does its work; the app doesn't have a cancel button, so you can't grab your phone mid-process. You can, however, encrypt your contacts and photos, so they can't be viewed from the SD card (the contacts are backed up in a proprietary format anyway), but I'm not sure why you'd want to.

Performance
Also, the backup function is painfully slow. Our test iPhone 4 ($199, 4 stars) had a humble three photos and a short contact list to back up and restore, and yet in our tests, the Superhero took 10 minutes to back everything up, and another 20 minutes to restore the data back to the phone. I'm glad the app doesn't include support for music or movies, because I'd likely still be waiting for the backup to complete.

This leads me to the Superhero's biggest issue. Yes, it's slow. Yes, it's simplistic. Yes, it lacks a USB connection. But even forgiving all these flaws, you can't get past one fact: Your computer already automatically backs up everything on your iPhone via iTunes. You can back up all your contacts, photos, music, and movies through iTunes, whether you use a Mac or a PC.

If the Iomega Superhero offered some useful portability aspect, some cross-system conversion feature, or even its own battery pack that could charge the phone in a pinch, it might make sense. Unfortunately, it just backs up a fraction of the data on your phone, a task to which iTunes is far better suited anyway. Unless you don't have a computer and desperately need to back up your contacts in an encrypted format, skip this $70 dock.