A hero with too many zeros

We’re big fans of companies actually giving their products names instead of alphanumeric gibberish—have you ever gone into a store and asked a salesperson for “the new WTF7331-74X?” Exactly. But, when you name your product the SuperHero, you’re putting yourself in the same league (Justice League?) as Superman, Batman, Spider-Man, and, to a lesser extent, Aquaman. It’s fitting, then, that the Iomega SuperHero is positioned to save the day if tragedy ever strikes your precious iPhone…but like all superheroes, it must struggle with its own weaknesses.

You might want to take a seat. This is going to take a while.

Iomega is very upfront about whom this dock is for—namely, people who never sync their iPhone to a computer. It’ll charge your phone, but there’s no USB connection to use the dock as a sync cradle. In fact, “SuperHero” may be overstating the case slightly. It can’t save the universe, just your contacts and photos in your Camera Roll to the included SD card. But these limited powers aren’t Iomega’s fault—they’re inherent in its iOS software. And Iomega tells us there’s another big limitation imposed by Cupertino. The SuperHero is throttled to a 6KB/sec data transfer rate (although we managed to top out at around 9KB/sec), but think about what that means. Backing up 25 2000KB photos from an iPhone 4 to the SuperHero takes over 90 minutes—making it more suited to an overnight backup than on-the-fly data dumps.

All that leaves the SuperHero in a weird spot. It could be better, if Apple’s restrictions didn’t exist. It’s as if Tony Stark created the Iron Man suit, but couldn’t get it to fly and it shot bullets instead of lasers—all without dropping its high price tag. Sure, it gets the job done, but it’s hindered by technology.

The bottom line. The Iomega dock does what it says it will do—very, very, slowly. So the $70 price tag makes it a hard sell, given its limited powers. And that means if the SuperHero were a superhero, it would be Aquaman.