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I believe its hit or miss. I got 'adequate' but not great battery life out of my early generation Gen 3. Well adequate considering the promises made for e-ink, but much better than a standard LCD PDA. There are some things to consider in regard to the battery life:
1) You've heard they only use juice when the page turns? Well that is true for the e-ink screen, but not necessarily for the device itself. The processor uses juice as long as it is awake. I believe your Irex has 802.11b? This is sure to burn up a battery if its left on. You might see about turning it off when its not needed. Also, I expect the touchscreen to use some battery capacity.
2) The manufacturer states 8000 page turns. My interpretation of that is more like half that number. When e-ink devices turn the page they first 'blank' the screen with a black flash. My guess is that the flash counts as a page turn, and then the actual page being written is another page turn for the purpose of battery life. You are displaying two pages (a black page briefly, followed by the true page).
3) The idea of page turns also gets funny for me, because I reread books a fair amount. When re-reading I will quickly skip through some pages. However, hitting next page ten or twenty times in a minute takes just as much screen juice as reading those pages and turning them at a slower rate. Therefore, the battery will run out sooner if you are skimming through a book - same number of page turns, but it takes a much shorter time to go through the pages.
3) I do believe that not all batteries are created equal. For example, my daughter had a problem with her cell phone battery and she was told that there were a number of phones of that model that had battery issues, while others were just fine. The bottom line is that any given unit could have a weaker battery in it due to manufacturing variation.
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