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LAS VEGAS — Of all the amazing technology on show here at International CES, the most surprising so far is Hewlett-Packard’s weird Sprout, a multitalented Franken-puter that looks like a ton of fun.

The HP Sprout is a touchscreen computer married to a multitouch pad, with a projector/camera/3-D scanner peering overhead. It looks like a bad prop from a Lego version of War of the Worlds.

I’d seen the press releases when it launched last October and had pretty low expectations. It just looked too weird. But I was genuinely delighted to see it in action.

LAS VEGAS — Companies are throwing sensors into everything this year. Toothbrushes, cookie jars, mouth guards … you name it, and someone is trying to cram some sort of sensor into it. Next up is your backpack.

AMPL Labs’ upcoming SmartBackpack promises to keep your tech items safe and charged for days by combining “smartsensors” with battery packs woven into the fabric. The end result is a supercharging backpack that can tackle anything from an iPhone to a MacBook, allowing wearers to charge multiple devices on the go.

“We found that 85 percent of consumers worry about their devices running out of power at least once a week,” said AMPL’s David Migdal. “So we developed our SmartBackpack to address all their power needs.”

LAS VEGAS — Your iPhone is really great at finding places to eat, recipes to cook and stores to buy food at, but when it comes to actually analyzing the things that go in your mouth, it’s not very futuristic. That’s where Consumer Physics comes in with its molecular analyzer called SCiO that brings Star Trek-like tech to your pocket.

SCiO is a tiny spectrometer similar to the giant ones found in laboratories that are used to analyze the molecular makeup of objects. Only instead of pumping out nothing but nerdy scientific facts, SCiO was designed to help iPhone users analyze everyday objects, so you can discover things like how much fat is in a piece of cheese or whether a watermelon is ripe.

“Your iPhone can tell you what song is playing on the radio, but when it comes to telling you the nutritional value of food it’s kind of clueless,” says Consumer Physics’ CEO Dror Sharon. “With SCiO we’re encouraging explorers to help us on our mission to map the physical world.”

The muse of the Hubble Space Telescope is even more alluring 20 years later.

Of all the breath-taking photos from the telescope’s camera, the blooming pillars of gas of the Eagle Nebula from 1995 became Hubble’s most iconic image, depicted on stamps, tee-shirts and in several cameos for film and television.

Hubble recently took another look at the star-lit towers of gas and cosmic dust – dubbed the Pillars of Creation — with a newer camera (installed in 2009) and captured greater detail that should give astronomers a chance to see how the clouds of oxygen, hydrogen and sulphur have changed since the first photograph.

LAS VEGAS — Bryan Chaffin loves his Casper mattress.

“I don’t even know where to start,” effused the Mac Observer executive vice president. “It’s the most comfortable mattress I’ve ever slept on. It was dead-easy to set up. It’s just incredibly comfortable.”

Chaffin is a satisfied customer of Casper, a New York startup shaking up the tired old mattress industry. Casper is doing everything differently, from the design of its all-foam mattress to the way it sells and ships direct to customers.

LAS VEGAS — Nobody wants to get hacked like Jennifer Lawrence’s iCloud account. Everyone, including Apple, is pushing two-factor authentication in the wake of the high-profile hack that exposed dozens of celebrities nude selfies, but verifying an account login with a code sent to your phone is a total pain.

In the not-so-distant future, we might all be storing two-factor authentication on our keychains.

Yubico is already providing eight out of 10 Silicon Valley companies with a tiny USB dongle called YubiKey that securely verifies an employee’s online identity. You just plug it into a computer and tap it when it’s time to log in. Now that Gmail has started supporting YubiKey on the front end, anyone can use it as the second verification step for getting into their inbox.

LAS VEGAS — It’s hard to say what’s most amazing about Elio Motors’ three-wheeled car: its sexy frame, its extreme fuel efficiency or its jaw-dropping $6,800 price tag.

That princely sum — a little less than a 12-core Mac Pro costs — gets you a sleek two-seater that looks like something you’d see in a sci-fi flick. It’s got two wheels up front, one in back and a built-in holder for your iPad.

And on the International CES show floor here, Elio’s got a team of breezy boosters who tout its many forward-looking features with the quick-witted humor of the best car salesmen.

“For $6,800, we ought to charge you for the air in the tires,” Elio Motors rep Don Harris told Cult of Mac when we asked if the iPad was included in the purchase price.

LAS VEGAS — I hate hunting. Not because I’m morally opposed to needlessly slaughtering animals, but because I’m a horrible shot.

I couldn’t hit a deer even if it was only 100 yards away, which is why I need TrackingPoint’s Internet-connected rifles. They boast the same type of precision-guided technology that fighter jets use to blast targets from miles away, while letting your family and friends watch the slaughter from the comfort of their couches.

LAS VEGAS — When Garmin launches a $600 smartwatch just a few weeks before Apple is about to introduce its category killer, the company must be pretty confident.

Here at International CES, Garmin is showing off its new line of Fenix 3 Sports Watches — multisport fitness trackers with built-in GPS that can pair with a smartphone to show various alerts and notifications. It comes in three models, including the handsome Sapphire, which has a hard sapphire crystal face. It’s a beauty, but surely doomed, right?

When asked if Garmin was worried about the Apple Watch, due to be launched sometime this spring, a spokeswoman confidently said absolutely not. She explained that Garmin’s watches are unapologetically outdoor fitness devices built for sportspeople who want a watch to do very specific things — track workouts – and aren’t interested in beaming heartbeats or sending emojis.

“They are purpose-built,” she said, gesturing at the display. “They’re built for hiking, biking and running. Garmin has been in the wearables market for 10 years. We’re not worried at all.”

LAS VEGAS — Keith Nothacker is living proof that persistence pays off.

Nothacker is here at the giant International CES gadget show to introduce a key-size version of his pocket breathalyzer — the first personal, police-grade breathalyzer approved by the Food and Drug Administration. Connected by bluetooth to your iPhone, a quick puff into the $49 BACtrack Vio will tell you instantly if you’re too juiced to drive — or take part in any other activity best done sober.

But 13 years ago, Nothacker was fighting the FDA to bring the device to market.

WhatsApp has come a long way from its early days, when creators Jan Koum and Brian Acton were inspired to create a cross-platform messenger app by Apple’s addition of push notifications to iOS 3.0.

Having been snapped up by Facebook for a cer-azy $19 billion almost a year ago, the popular app has now announced a personal record-breaking 700 million monthly active users — a whole 100 million more than were using the service back in August.

Remember when just a couple days ago, mobile marketing firm TapSense said at CES they would release a service for the Apple Watch that allowed developers to push ads to your wrist?

Well, it turns out it’s not as bad as all that. Yes, you’ll probably have ads on the Apple Watch in one way or another. But they’ll be super limited.

A lot has changed at Apple in the years since Steve Jobs died. While much of it is good (record-breaking iPhone sales, work on the new Apple campus, the stock-split leading to new share price highs), it’s unavoidable that one or two (or, indeed, 7) things would slip through the cracks, which Apple’s notoriously perfectionist late CEO would have hated.

The recent publishing of a patent for an iOS stylus — an accessory Jobs was vocal about opposing — got us thinking about other aspects of Apple, circa 2015, that likely would have rubbed the company’s late CEO the wrong way.

Here’s what we came up with.

We’re coming up to four months since the public release of iOS 8, and according to Apple’s own stats, 68 percent of users are now running the latest version of its mobile operating system. This is up five percent from one month ago — most likely buoyed by the massive number of iOS device activations which took place over the holidays.

iOS 7, meanwhile, fell 3 percentage points to 29 percent of the total active iOS user base, while earlier versions of the OS now hover around 4 percent. (Yes, we know those numbers add up to slightly more than 100 percent: it’s likely due to rounding-up the figures involved.)

When Apple comes up with an iconic design for an Apple Store, it often likes to replicate it elsewhere.

Just like the glass cube created for the company’s Fifth Avenue flagship store in New York has also popped up in other Apple Stores around the world, so too is the company reusing the glass cylinder entrance architecture design first created for its Pudong brick-and-mortar store in Shanghai.

The stunning 30-foot glass structure design will make a reappearance for Apple’s forthcoming Chongqing Apple Store, located in the city’s upmarket Guotai Plaza.

The iPhone 6 and 6 Plus has been an enormous success for Apple, and a new report from Kantar Worldpanel demonstrates just how true this is.

In the month of November, the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus represented 47.4 percent of all smartphones sold in the United States. For those keeping track at home, that’s a 4.3 percent increase from the same time in 2013, when the iPhone 5s and 5c were the latest iPhone models on the market.

The iPhone 6 was also the best-selling smartphone three months in a row in the U.S., with an overall market share of 19 percent. Verizon and AT&T made up 57 percent of all iOS sales during this time.

And it’s not just the U.S. where the iPhone’s taking over, either.

A game which asks you to literally throw your iPhone in the air to make it perform extreme sport-style tricks sounds like a recipe for disaster.

Nonetheless, that’s the concept behind Gyro Skate, a new $1.99 iOS title that aims to replicate the skateboarding experience by asking gamers to perform stunts like the 360 flip by physically rotating your iPhone.

Monster Inc, the company that help co-design the original Beats by Dr. Dre headphones, is suing Beats Electronics along with cofounders Dr. Dre and Jimmy Iovine for allegedly stealing its headphone technology.

The company, known for its overpriced audio cables, filed a lawsuit this week in San Mateo California, claiming Beats and its founders screwed the it out of millions of dollars before the company was sold to Apple last year for $3 billion. According to court documents obtained by USA Today, Monster says Beats concealed its role in the designing and engineering the headphone line, as well as its part in the manufacturing, distributions and selling of the headphones.

When we first saw the new Jurassic World trailers, we were stunned and excited. Then, after it sunk in that the actor that plays doofus Andy Dwyer on NBC’s hilarious Parks and Recreation would be fighting dinosaurs, we sort of imagined a mashup of the two.

Apparently, Thanks Mom Productions had a similar thought, as they’ve taken footage of Chris Pratt from both the movie trailers and the TV show and edited them together for a funny video that’s all kinds of awesome.

Check it out.

LAS VEGAS — With its wide base and gently sloping sides, the Archt one speaker looks a little like an egg pod from Alien or the business end of a bomb.

Its outer shell is sleek black plastic, with a flat ring around the top that gives it a space-age feel. If the killer looks aren’t enough to grab your attention, the speaker’s ground-thumping bass will.

“It gets really loud,” Archt CEO Evan Foo told Cult of Mac.

While the all-in-one wireless speaker is certainly loud — it was ballsy enough to cut through the background noise here at the International CES trade show — the goal is to deliver CD-quality sound, no matter the source of the audio.

He is an Eagle Scout, a versatile bar-band drummer and a senior GUI designer for a company that creates mobile apps for the health care industry.

But Scott Wade is famous for drawing dirty pictures.

It’s not the content that raises eyebrows but the canvas on which Wade creates. Present him with a dirty car and see why some call him the “da Vinci of Dust.”

Who hasn’t walked by a car coated in dirt and used their finger to scrawl the message, “Wash me”? Wade, inspired by the dirt roads of his home state of Texas, uses a car’s dirty window as an opportunity to create elaborate landscapes, detailed portraiture with subtle shading and re-imagined classic works like The Mona Lisa or Van Gogh’s Starry Night.

LAS VEGAS — I’ve had a standing desk for two years now, and while it’s practically the greatest piece of furniture to ever enter my life, I somehow forget to actually stand at it while working.

HumanScale is all too familiar with lazy people like me using their ergonomic desks without reaping the full benefits, so the company teamed up with Detroit startup Tome to create a standing desk solution called OfficeIQ that syncs with HealthKit to tell you when you’re being too damn lazy.

LAS VEGAS — The wait for the world’s first Lightning headphones is almost over.

Philips’ upcoming Fidelio M2L bypasses the analog headphone jack, instead sending the digital audio signal through the Lightning port used in late-model iOS devices.

“You keep the digital signal as far as possible until you have no choice,” Benoit Borette, a Philips audio engineer, told Cult of Mac.

Apple did amazing things in 2014, but when it comes to growth, the iPad wasn’t exactly a blockbuster success. In fact, they’ve been slumping. Although Cook views slowing iPad growth as a “speed bump,” iPad upgrades are inarguably closer to the upgrade rate of laptops than smartphones.

Cook’s optimistic. “Because we’ve only been in the market for four years, we don’t know how long the upgrade cycle will be for people,” Cook said during the October earnings call. “So that’s a difficult thing to call.”

So what does 2015 hold for the iPad? Sadly, it’s not clear.

LAS VEGAS — On the surface, there’s nothing very exciting about a portable flash drive. It doesn’t excite me at all. But make that drive a sleek, Lightning-equipped, 256GB beast of a thing, and now we’re talking.

The Leef iBridge, on display here at International CES, packs the most storage of any iOS-compatible hard drive on the market. But all that space comes at a steep price.

$399.99, to be exact. Certainly jaw-dropping, but something in me, and obviously in the Leef team, believes there’s at least a few people out there who will buy it. If not, the cheaper 128GB ($200), 64GB ($120), 32GB ($80) and 16GB ($60) models should appeal to the layman.

There’s a nice companion iOS app that reads what you’ve stored and even lets you shoot photos/video directly to the drive. Not a bad thing to have for a photo adventure in the wilderness. Or if you still don’t have enough storage available to install iOS 8.