Makes me miss the old days. I dropped my iPod Mini while jogging and it skittered across the pavement and got run over by a car. There was a slight nick on the aluminum casing, but that was it. More recently, my Zune 120 fell out of my pocket onto concrete while I was on my roof (second floor). Works like a charm.
I'd be willing to deal with a phone that's an inch thick but can stand up to a fall without a case.
You must have got really lucky about how the car ran over the iPod, because I have seen a couple iPod's get run over by cars and in all cases where the tire went directly over the body of the iPod the device was essentially compacted flat by about 25% with the screen fractured and crushed down into the body and the electronics and the backing of the iPod had indentations of the street pavement texture.
Needless to say they were history, but fun to take apart and see the mutilated insides.
Are we talking iPod, or iPod Mini? The structural integrity of the iPod Mini comes from being milled from a single block of brushed metal. The regular iPods of the day were at least two pieces of metal (or metal and plastic). I believe the back of the iPod was even just a thin sheet of aluminum as opposed to the relatively thick unibody iPod Mini. These regular iPods would be trivial to crush. The iPod Mini was a fantastic bit of engineering. I wish Apple had gone with that design for the iPhone. Instead, the iPod Mini look has been turned into phone design by Nokia.
It's easy to find phones that will be extremely rugged and less than an inch thick with the addition of a case -- that would be almost any of them, really. What difference does it make that some of that inch is a case?
I have a leather book-style cover on my Nexus 7 and it's still well under an inch thick.
Now, when I say rugged, I mean throw it across the room and run it over with a truck. I don't mean "drop it from pocket height". A case protects against a light bump, a rugged design can be used as an impromptu jack stand when your car gets a flat.
I'd be willing to deal with a phone that's an inch thick but can stand up to a fall without a case.