People are rally attached to their phone. They want to have it everywhere. Some people are not capable of walking or driving without one. So why don’t we have more rugged phones??? Unfortunately this isn’t the first time that manufactures were slow to pick up on the obvious. Another good example is the digital camera. Just like cell phones, they went from expensive high tech, to mainstream to totally dominant at every level before manufactures figured out we might want to take them to the beach without being hermetically sealed in plastic. Guess what? People still want to take a picture at the beach/lake/river or somewhere where it might rain. And do you know what 
has been replacing those ubiquitous digital cameras? That’s right, smaller digital cameras embedded into phones. So now you want to take both your phone AND your camera to all these wet, dusty unpredictable places and our choices of hardware are pathetic. Why? Are phones harder to waterproof than cameras? The phone market is much larger than the camera market so demand is not the issue.
There are some options. There are several ruggedized phones from companies that you never heard of running operating systems that have been replaced 3 times over and they are not cheap. There is also a treatment called Liquipel where they teat your phone with a very thin layer of plastic to make it water resistant. It costs $60
, you have to send them your phone and they tell you not to get it wet. I think Panasonic and Sony have announced or introduced water resistant phones but they don’t seem to be commonly available.
Would you consider buying a "tough" phone and swapping out your SIM card when going on an outing? Do you think some parents might want to give their 12 yr old something that could survive being dropped from the height of a 12 yr old or live through a fund raiser car wash? There is a statistic out there that says 1 in 5 people have dropped their phone into the toilet. I don’t see that number going down in the future. Apple what are you waiting for?
A waterproof cell, to take out in the kayak. “Hey, Linda, caught a 9-pound mudfish. Start the fire.”
or so I could instantly update my facebook page with said mudfish (If I had facebook and even knew what a mudfish was)