Absolute power, in your (capacious) pocket: Cuktech 15 Air Review

Back when mobile phones were tiny and useless, except for texting and playing Snake (ask your great-aunt), they did have a hidden superpower – or rather, they just had power. Before the world came to your handset, corrupted everything and everyone, and made pub quizzes a competition amongst those who could look up the name of that song by Sixpence None The Richer, you could guarantee that your phone would never run out of battery. 

They must’ve been powered by ley lines or something, as you could leave one in a drawer for six weeks and it’d still be on, and have at least three bars but only five missed calls, four of which were you trying to locate it with your house phone.

Nowadays, and yes, I’m well old, you’re lucky if a charge will last longer than a Pakistan Test innings at Lords. Everything is on there, and no one knows what to do when you get the little sad tune to tell you you’re at 10% – except panic, as your train ticket’s on there and you’re using the maps app to get you to the station in time for the last, fast train.

Woe betide you if you go off grid for a while…

Luckily, these days there are many ways to carry some precious phone juice around with you. Power banks come in many shapes and some disappointing sizes, and thankfully standardisation is finally arriving in the powered devices market.

Gone are the days when each manufacturer had their own cable standard, resulting in a veritable rat’s nest of a tangle in the kitchen drawer – thankfully, most brands are rolling out the standard of USB-C. Wireless charging, while convenient, has its own pitfalls with overheating and poor connection among the more stressful of them.

It’s not uncommon for me to carry at least one power bank, sometimes two or three, and a multitude of cables to interface with my legacy tech – but they’re not darn big enough for my power-hungry kit. That was until I had a go of the Cuktech 15 Air. 

The bank has a reassuring heft about it, and an output of 15000mAh, beefy enough to keep a USB-C powered laptop going for a while, although there is more than one output port (2 x USB-C and one USB-A). It has a natty multi-function TFT display that shows current capacity, output, and an estimated charge time.

That’s all well and good, I hear you scoff, but what about out in the field? 

Well, I’ve tried it in various fields over the summer – an all-day rock concert at Queens Park in Dublin, two weeks camping on Strangford Lough, a long weekend at a gravel bike festival and a 13 mile charity walk in North Norfolk. The Cuktech never let me down, even helping my GoPro to keep topped up on the Giant’s Causeway, helping charge my back-up SRAM battery on Salisbury Plain, and two mobiles joyfully powered for the finish line photos for the half-marathon Trek around Wells-Next-The-Sea.

It has never run down completely and seems to get back up to full capacity relatively quickly – it’ll self-charge up to 23% in 10 minutes – handy in a camper van running on a leisure battery. The power delivery is instant, and the display means I have no guesswork about how much is left in the tank.

It even comes with a soft pouch so you can carry it around in your pocket, in a rucksack or a handlebar bag without it getting scratched or scuffed – there’s room for a couple of cables in there too. 

I’m planning another couple of long events this month, and this beauty will be coming to my rescue should I need it for a selfie at the top of Ditchling Beacon, or to buy an emergency ferry ticket back to Lymington from the Isle of Wight.

Cuktech 15 Air Power Bank, £59.99 – cuktech.com