Trying Android for the first time after 7 years iPhone..

[PDFierro]

My Nexus 5 battery is good enough for what I use it for. It's on standby for most of the day, with maybe 3 hours of youtube/music/small games/ internet browsing, and 2 e-mail set to update every hour. When I charge it at night, after 15 hours, it still has roughly 65% battery. It's not the best, but most people charge their devices up at night anyway, so it's easily good enough.

I felt like their was a battery saving increase on Cyanogenmod compared to stock android, but that is not to any scientific conclusions.
Word of warning though, the Qualcomm battery guru app made my battery life worse, and I had been using it for 3 weeks before I deleted it. Also, some apps can be a real battery drain even though you'd think they were idle.(Dots)

That's good to hear. I certainly don't need drop-dead amazing battery life, but while some people good get battery with the Nexus 5, I have been under the impression that you can't even get through the whole day. I just want to do the usage you described + taking photos and still have battery left over at the end of the day.

Perhaps I'll give it a try.

 

[Paradoxally]

For iMessage, there is a workaround. If you have a spare iPod/iPhone/iPad, jailbreak it and install Remote Messages. It's completely cross-platform, so you'll be able to message from anywhere (Windows/Mac/Linux desktop browser, Android browser, etc...). You can also send SMS with this tweak, provided its an iPhone.

This works on the local network, but I suppose you could use dynamic DNS to set up access from anywhere.

Edit: Yep, I tried it and using no-ip works and its free to set up. All you need to do is configure your router with DDNS and then forward port 333 (its remote messages default) to point to your idevice.

So you'd enter https://xxxxxx.noip.me:333 from anywhere, where xxxxx is your chosen domain name and it should work (if using SSL in remote messages, if not, omit https://).