Waitaminnit–what is a storage company like Iomega doing making an iPhone dock? Well, its new SuperHero is a storage device: The $69.99 gizmo packs a 4GB SD card. And when you use it with Iomega’s iPhone app, it’ll back up your contacts and photos as you charge your phone. (If you’ve got more than 4GB of stuff, you can swap out the included SD card and insert one of your own.) If you lose your data–or lose your phone, period, and get a new one–you can use the Iomega app to restore the data.

The SuperHero only protects contacts and photos because those are the only file types it can get to in the sandboxed world of iOS–it’s still up to you to make sure that apps, calendar data, and other information is backed up. That means that you can’t give up using the (surprisingly unintuitive) backup feature built into iTunes. But if you don’t back up as often as you should, SuperHero adds an additional safety net.

A SuperHero that could do a full iPhone backup would be a killer product and a good buy at $69.99; the existing version strikes me as clever, but a trifle pricey. Any thoughts?

Meanwhile, Iomega is getting into the streaming Internet TV box business with Iomega TV, a line of devices that run the same Boxee software as D-Link’s Boxee Box. The $229.99 version provides essentially the same features as D-Link’s product, but in a more sedate, lower-profile case that will probably fit into entertainment centers more easily; the $299.99 version adds 1TB of on-board storage, and the $349.99 one has 2TB.

Iomega TV ships in February, and the fact that Iomega wasn’t the first company out of the gate with a Boxee device for TVs might actually be an advantage: D-Link’s version has suffered from delays in support for Netflix, Hulu Plus, and Vudu, the services which will give Boxee much of its appeal for folks who aren’t primarily interested in streaming their own locally-stored content around the network.

Lastly, Iomega has announced a new Home Media Network Hard Drive Cloud Edition, a network-attached drive available in $159.99 (1TB) and $199.99 (2TB) versions. It includes a free new service called Personal Cloud–a phrase everyone seems to love these days–which provides access to all the data stored on the drive over the Web, allowing you to view your stuff in any browser, share it with other folks, or sync it among multiple Personal Cloud-enabled products. It sounds a bit like PogoPlug, or like a version of SugarSync that stores everything on your drive rather than in the great big non-personal cloud.

Personal Cloud is also built into the Iomega TV products, and the company says it’ll be rolling the feature into upcoming versions of other storage products such as its StorCenter systems in the first quarter of this year.

But here’s one piece of news: Vudu, the neat movie rental and purchase service which started out on its own hardware but has more recently shifted its strategy to being a streaming service available on devices such as Blu-Ray players and HDTVs, will also be on Boxee. And it won’t just be on Boxee’s box: You’ll be able to get Vudu content via Boxee’s software for PCs and Macs as well.

Like Amazon’s Video on Demand, Vudu will let you buy a movie or TV show once, then stream it to any computer or other gizmo you own that supports the Vudu service, giving you a video collection in the sky. As always, its specialty is content presented in as high-quality a form as possible: On the Boxee Box, it’ll is available in 1080p high definition with Dolby Digital+ sound. Sadly, though, only standard-definition content will be available on PCs and Macs, although Vudu’s best SD looks better than some “HD” I’ve seen.

Given that Google TV is so disappointing in its initial form, I’m more curious than ever about the Boxee Box. No word yet about other services it may have lined up–Netflix Watch Instantly and/or Hulu Plus would complement Vudu nicely.

(Full disclosure: My fiancée is employed by Vudu’s public relations agency.)

Apple TV, the Boxee Box, Google TV, Hulu, Roku, and a sundry of desktop (and now mobile) applications comprise a compelling alternative to traditional cable TV service. My colleague Harry McCracken has them all pretty well covered.

I know many people who have “unplugged” themselves from the shackles of costly year-long contracts. Why pay for channels that you don’t watch? Those people are typically more technically savvy than most of the population. I just recently upgraded my mother’s 1980s big screen TV to an HDTV.

My mother and I find what’s on TV in much the same way: we channel surf or use a “guide.” There are more than a few shows that drew me in by happenstance. AMC’s “Breaking Bad” is my favorite “accident.” Internet TV is surfing with a net, keeping us in the familiar, and not venturing out into the unexplored.

Sure, Internet TV has media guides that showcase featured content, but where does that leave programs that aren’t already in the spotlight? Would Internet TV allow me to stumble onto a “Twilight Zone” rerun at 3 AM? Sometimes randomness is nice – I don’t always like to know exactly what I’m looking for.

Internet TV is better suited for enabling a user to watch what they want when they want. I’m keeping my cable, but will be buying a Boxee Box as an alternative to Time Warner Cable’s on-demand services.

Now that Roku’s out and Apple TV is just about here, the next big questions for this category all rotate around Google TV and the Boxee Box–both of which aim for a more feature-packed, comprehensive approach to Internet TV than the keep-it-simple-and-cheap Roku and Apple TV. I hope to try ‘em all before the holidays are here.

While I’m not one to dwell on personnel changes at entertainment companies, Zucker’s an interesting figure. As CNet points out, he’s notorious for giving tech companies a hard time over NBC content. Notably, NBC tried to get a cut of iPod revenue while negotiating  iTunes licensing of TV shows, and NBC is not taking part in the 99-cent show rentals Apple TV will offer. Zucker said that price would “devalue” the network’s content.

NBC’s Winter Olympics coverage was also terrible. Event feeds were unavailable online to people who didn’t have cable subscriptions, and major events were tape-delayed and kept offline to force primetime viewing.

But when I think of Zucker, I’m reminded most of his hard line against Boxee, which tried to use content from Hulu, the web video site backed by NBC, News Corp and ABC.

Boxee’s software, and soon-to-come hardware, pull video from around the web into a slick, TV-friendly interface. Its attempts to include Hulu caused an endless back-and-forth, as Hulu kept trying to thwart Boxee, and vice versa. When Congress was vetting Comcast’s proposed NBC acquisition last February, Zucker responded to a question about this little battle by calling Boxee “illegal.”

Then, Boxee chief executive and founder Avner Ronen picked Zucker’s argument apart. He noted that Boxee technically uses a web browser to access Hulu content, and serves up Hulu’s ads, making money for the site. In hindsight, NBC was likely setting a precedent for Hulu Plus, a $10 per month premium service, as the only way to access the site through the television.

I’m not naive enough to think that Zucker’s departure will suddenly make life easier for Boxee, Apple or any other company that peddles Internet TV, especially since Comcast has a vested interest in protecting the cable television business. According to MSNBC, Comcast Chief Operating Officer Steve Burke is likely to oversee the joint venture. Zucker’s tenure had a profound impact on what we can watch online, but I predict that NBC content will become even tougher for Internet TV companies to obtain.

I met with Boxee CEO Avner Ronen and D-Link Director of Consumer Marketing Brent Collins this weekend to get a sneak peek of a nearly-final Boxee Box. And you know what? Despite the avalanche of competition it’ll face, it still looks pretty cool.

The two companies are releasing some new tidbits about the Box today. They say the $200 gizmo will ship on schedule in November, and that they’re taking pre-orders via Amazon.com starting today. (Amazon buyers will get their Boxes a week before other folks.)

More surprising: The Box will be powered by an Intel Atom CE4100 processor. That’s news because the original version that Boxee showed off packed an Nvidia Tegra 2. The silicon switcheroo helps to explain why the Box will reach TV fans later than Boxee and D-Link originally expected. And Ronen told me that it will enable the Box to comfortably play 1080p video–stuff that’s stored on a home network at first, and streaming 1080p from online sources as it becomes available.

The Boxee Box will sport both 802.11n wireless and Ethernet networking, and will come with an RF remote control with a QWERTY keyboard on its backside. The software is similar to Boxee’s clients for Windows, the Mac, and Linux, and includes a built-in WebKit browser and Flash support which give it the technical chops to play back nearly all the video the Web has to offer. As always, the user interface looks fresh and fun, if a bit dense with options.

Boxee recently announced that it’s partnering with four online movie stores to bring films to the Box, and it has relationships in place with Internet video powerhouses such as Revision3. But it’s still not entirely clear what services will be baked into the Box when it ships in November. The Box I saw today appeared to support Hulu, but it’ll be a miracle (and at odds with history) if Hulu doesn’t try to block it. And when I asked about Netflix Watch Instantly, Ronen told me that Boxee and D-Link “werent demoing” that service, and that the companies would have more news about built-in services before the Box hits stores. (Here’s hoping it’s good news.)

I’m still trying to make up my mind about the Boxee Box’s attractive-but-idiosyncratic industrial design. It’s entertaining for sure–but when it comes to set-top boxes, entertainment value is less critical than convenience. The Box is a surprisingly tall little guy by current Internet-TV-box standards, and it won’t fit into a stack of living-room components. (If there’s a second-generation Box, I wouldn’t be startled if it’s a tad more orthodox in shape.)

The Box will obviously get lumped in with the new Apple TV–hey, I did it earlier in this post–but the two gadgets’ approaches to Internet TV are as different as they are similar. Apple’s box offers Netflix, iTunes rentals, YouTube, and streaming from iOS devices for $99, at a maximum resolution of 720p with a typically stripped-down interface and remote. The $199 Boxee Box, by contrast, does 1080p, plays an array of video formats for content stored on home networks, pulls in online video and audio from all over the Web, has apps for Web services such as Pandora, and has a rich array of options and a QWERTY remote. It’s unquestionably a much geekier device than Apple TV, but the pricetag doesn’t seem irrational if you are indeed a geek.

It’s Google TV that looks like a more direct counterpart to Boxee: Both platforms aim to bring a profusion of Web video into the living room via WebKit browsers and Flash support, for instance, and both promise fancier remote controls than Apple’s minimalist model. But it’s tough to say how Boxee compares to Google TV devices such as Logitech’s Revue until every detail is known and they’re both available for testing.

Me, I’m most dependent on two Internet TV boxes: a Roku (which resembles Apple TV more than it does Boxee) and a TiVo HD (which provides access to Amazon Video on Demand, Netflix, and other services). I’m looking forward to trying some of the new contenders before the year is out. This is the first holiday season that I can imagine multiple new Internet TV boxes being hits…and even though the Boxee Box won’t sell in Apple TV-like numbers, I could see it doing quite well.

As usual, I’m in favor of waiting longer for a better product. But it’s disappointing news to those whose appetites Boxee began to whet so long ago.

A Boxee Box that was available this month would have had a nice head start on Logitech’s Google TV-based set-top box and other Google TV hardware which is due in time for the holidays. Now they’ll debut more or less simultaneously–and it’ll be fun to watch them duke it out.

I hadn’t heard of Redux before its Boxee partnership was announced today, but it seems destined for the television. You set up an account and select from a list of interests, such as humor, art or video games, and Redux automatically creates a playlist, letting you sit back and watch without hunting for new clips. You can also follow like-minded people through the service — or sync with people you already follow on Facebook, Twitter and MySpace — to see what they’re watching.

It’s easy to see Redux’s disposable entertainment as something to play in the background at a party or after stumbling back from the bar — things like the Toronto Raptors’ mascot swallowing a cheerleader, a random fight on a bus, or an epic steel drum solo. At a computer I wouldn’t necessarily need these videos chosen for me, but from the couch it could be fun to turn on Redux and let the user-made content come to you.

There are some things I wish were different about the service. I personally don’t like the user comments that pop up when watching a popular video, so it’d be great if you could toggle them off. And because I don’t have a set-top that supports Boxee, I’d like to see Redux on other set-tops, Blu-ray players, game consoles or televisions. I’m told both of those gripes will be addressed in the future.

Redux, however, doesn’t plan to add premium content, which is a shame. I can understand that the service is all about people sharing videos made by other people, but I’d love to see Redux apply its brand of serendipity to TV shows and movies. There’s only so much user-made content I can take now matter how it’s delivered.