Well, my dream of having an iRex is one step closer with the new reader and suitably sized screen.

But from reviews I have read, the battery life is still an issue. The whole point of e-Ink paper was that it required no energy to display content. Yet the iRex readers are built in such a way to be empty by the end of the day if used because of the underlying hardware -- I can't even remember to charge my cell phone once a week half the time. Considering that, a one week working life is something I would want first.

Ideally, the reader should wake up to turn the page or whatnot and go right back to sleep again - not running full speed the entire time.

One question - turned off, will the display keep the last page read or is it blank?

blank, while in suspend to ram it should preserve the display of course.

I guess I'll disagree. In an occasion where I was deliberately trying to run out of battery power, I managed to do so, and the screen stayed as it is.
I was surprised to see it, and I'm wrong please someone correct me, but if you cut the power, the screen seems to stay with the last content displayed. If this is wrong, then I'd like to know how on earth my dying battery lasted for over 40 mins before I found a laptop and plugged in the cable. That immediately powered it up, the screen was refreshed and the device booted. That's the reason I believe the device will see a very significant increase in its usage time once the power management is implemented.

Best Regards
Seref

well, it actually takes power to refresh the screen to "white", so technically, if it indeed suddenly ran out of juice, the scenario you sketch is the more likely

I was surprised to see it, and I'm wrong please someone correct me, but if you cut the power, the screen seems to stay with the last content displayed.

This is the way that all eInk screens behave.

I guess I'll disagree. In an occasion where I was deliberately trying to run out of battery power, I managed to do so, and the screen stayed as it is.
I was surprised to see it, and I'm wrong please someone correct me, but if you cut the power, the screen seems to stay with the last content displayed.

Yes, but that's a special case. If you turn off the device using the power switch, then it will deliberately blank the screen before it shuts down. If you cut power, then whatever was last on the screen will stay there.

You can see this behavior, at least in the Cybook, when you hit the reset button on the back. The image stays the same indefinitely.
The image stays the same until you boot the unit again.

The iLiad does the same thing, a reset doesn't blank the screen. It confuses a lot of people though, because they think that because the screen still has an image on it that the reset didn't work. They don't realize the device really has been reset.

This is also why they intentionally blank the screen when you hit the power switch. Technically eInk can keep the same static image on the screen when it's turned off, but the manufacturers of the devices decided not to do it that way. People found it too confusing.

I don't know for sure about the DR, but I assume it has the same behavior.

A reset on a DR1000 blanks the screen and it forces the DR1000 to attempt to re-start. On the other e-Ink devices, a reset forces them to switch off, leaving the last image on the screen indefinitely.

You can't hit the power switch to turn off a DR1000, as its a software only shutdown. Run out of power and the last image stays on the screen, as sarikan found.