This Aulumu M10 portable charger makes me feel like I’m in Mission: Impossible

Unless you spend your days running along the top of speeding trains, riding motorbikes off cliffs, or hanging off the side of planes, chances are you rarely feel like you’re living in a blockbuster movie, but in a very small way the Aulumu M10 could change that.

While most power banks are anonymous, identikit rectangles, the Aulumu M10 does a pretty good impression of the kind of sci-fi MacGuffin that Ethan Hunt and the rest of the IMF team might chase across the globe in one of the Mission: Impossible films.

Of course, laying your hands on an M10 won’t save the world, but it might just save your day. It gives you three different ways to unleash the 10,000mAh inside: MagSafe, a built-in USB-C cable, and an Apple Watch dock.

Using all three at once will limit how quickly you can charge stuff – a ‘breathing’ light strip will indicate how fast it’s going – but plug in an iPhone 17 on its own and it’ll hit 65% in 30 minutes. Top wired speed with a compatible device is 35W, MagSafe maxes out at 15W (but it’ll depend on what your phone can handle), and the Apple Watch charger runs at 2.5W.

At just 248g it won’t weigh you down too much, and it’s designed to stay cool even when multitasking, so you shouldn’t have to worry about it going up in a puff of smoke before you’ve had a chance to even read your messages.

Aulumu sent me an M10 to try out, and while I haven’t had a chance to test it in the field yet, it looks every bit as high-tech in real life as it does in the pictures. It’s pretty chunky – almost the same height and width as my iPhone 16 Pro and about twice as thick – but it’s very nicely made and feels reassuringly solid.

I do have a couple of slight reservations already. The USB-C cable is designed to double as a hook but there’s nothing to secure it in place so it wouldn’t take much for it to come loose, and I’m not convinced the aluminium alloy panels will stay scratch-free for very long. Even without leaving the house mine has already picked up a small mark on the front. Fortunately, you get a little protective bag for it included in the box so it shouldn’t get too bashed up when it’s not in use.

Your portable charging mission, should you choose to accept it, will cost you $90/£78, and should hopefully stop you self-destructing next time your battery starts to die.

• MORE: Best power banks and portable chargers for charging on the go

Tom Wiggins Contributor

About

Stuff's second Tom has been writing for the magazine and website since 2006, when smartphones were only for massive nerds and you could say “Alexa” out loud without a robot answering. Over the years he’s written about everything from MP3s to NFTs, played FIFA with Trent Alexander-Arnold, and amassed a really quite impressive collection of USB sticks.

Areas of expertise

A bit of everything but definitely not cameras.