> It's not a huge leap of faith to assume they mean the phone as in the thing covered in glass and fragile touchscreen.
Not all phones are fragile. Ones with bodies made out of glass or aluminium are, ones with "nice to glide your finger along" glass screens can be. But those "features" are found in expensive phones.
Cheap phones, with their plastic bodies, flexible touch screens and removable batteries that tend to leave the case on impact are remarkably robust. As in "riding bike at 30km / hour, phone leaps out of pocket smashes into concrete gutter, covers and battery fly this way and that and so you have to dodge traffic to retrieve them" are perfectly fine after the incident, after reassembly. In fact on of my phones survived multiple rounds of that treatment.
Cheap phones being robust and expensive ones being delicate is a bug bear of mine. The one caveat is cheap phones are never water proof.
Cheap or expensive, I've never see the phones electronics damaged by an impact.
Modern phones aren't fragile but they are slippery, and it's still annoying to drop them especially if it can go down a grate or something. So a case prevents that.
> If it wasn't fragile - people would not buy cases and protective glass for their phone.
Well for my money I think they're mostly nonsense.
I never use them and despite living in my pockets for years, my phone aren't scratched up. Cases are annoying and unwieldy, making it more likely I would drop my phone, and screen protectors make the screen look worse - which I think is what they're supposed to prevent?
I often go 5+ years with the same phone, so it's not like I write them off any faster. My S2 and S5 both lasted for ages, and they both still work perfectly fine - the only issue is that software "outgrew" them.
Modern electronics are quite the opposite of fragile, I'd say.