I usually use a few bags of sugar to tilt my phone up if i'm eating in a restaurant haha but i guess if you need to stand your phone up all the time its a pretty cool solution.
Just buy a iphone dock with decent speakers to amplify the alarm when it goes off. Or plug it in some desktop speakers or pair it with a portable bluetooth speaker.
If youre using a 4 an upgrade to a 5s would definitely be worth it. Or even grab a 5 if youre on a budget. Just stay away from the 5C, its pretty lame.
I guess it depends on how quick you can download the update. But it shouldn't take more than 30min.
I've been running it for a few months now and i have had no problems. Everything is stable.
for the video and photo editing you'll need a half decent GPU (graphics processing unit). So make sure when you buy a laptop it comes with a video card (the GPU), so you can run all the graphics intensive applications smoothly.