Yep, that's exactly how it works! I have the i-Con nano at home, so I'm very familiar with it.
When it detects that power has been constant (and constantly relatively low) for the standby timer period, it drops down to the standby temperature and stays there until either the "shutdown" timer is reached (where it drops down to 50C) or is woken up.
From standby, when it's time to solder again, you either press any button, or touch the tip to something so that it detects a sudden temperature drop and goes "time to wake up!" Touching to solder isn't normally quite enough, since the 200C standby temp I have it set to (default is 250C*) is only just barely enough to melt leaded solder, and the contact area is so small, especially given the inevitable oxidation after sitting idle long enough to go into standby, that it might not conduct away enough heat. But by then you need to wipe anyway, so may as well use the brass wool or sponge. So I always just touch it to the brass wool.
It is actually sensitive enough that if you wave the 200C iron around in the air like an idiot at a high enough speed, it can cool enough to detect it. But since that's dangerous and slower than just touching it to the brass wool, you'd also have to be an idiot to do it that way!
From the 50C shutdown, only a button press can wake it.
The only real annoyance about this system is this: trying to wake it
while it is transitioning to the standby temperature. Because it is
expecting a rapid cooldown from the soldering temperature (for example, 330C) to the 200C standby, it won't respond to touching to the brass wool or solder because it thinks it's still just cooling off. This is
super irritating if it happens literally a second or so before you want to solder a joint, because you start applying solder to re-tin the tip, and then it just keeps cooling... This is the sole reason I had to abandon setting the standby timer to just 1 minute: it would happen that, even with the iron in my hand, if I took too long prepping a solder joint, it would enter standby just between joints! So I raised it back to the 5 minute default and that's that.
So basically, you can't wake it by drawing heat away until it has first stabilized at 200C. (It will, of course, wake instantly by pressing a button during cooldown.) I do wonder if this could be improved in firmware, so that during cooldown to standby, it can detect a sharp change in the
rate of change of the tip temperature!
I use the i-Con 2V at work, which has the handpiece with the accelerometer in it, and honestly, both systems work really well. The difference in how soon you're ready to solder again is absolutely minimal. (In fact, in one way the accelerometer-based wake is worse, in that just accidentally bumping the iron in the stand will wake it, even if I don't actually intend to use it. The accelerometer does prevent
entering standby by mistake, of course.)
*Maybe it's more responsive with a 250C standby, but that's so close to leaded soldering temps that I thought it'd make more sense to lower it. I set it so long ago that I don't remember.
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