Welcome on board.
⚠️ First thing's first: Please be vigilant and take extra care if anybody tries to reach you via DM and asks you to do anything you're unfamiliar with, including "verifying your identity" or anything such. Crypto world has a ton of different scams going around at the same time, so be careful out there. ⚠️
Now for your question, having a hardware wallet is simply a way to ensure that your wallet remains offline for the most part. In effect, minimising interaction with the internet and other communication methods drastically reduces possibilities of an exploit. Your seed phrase (also called mnemonics, seed pass, secret phrase, etc.) is the real deal. So you MUST, under all circumstances, keep that seed phrase safe and secret. That'll be your ONLY way to access your funds. Similarly, if anybody has your seed phrase, they have all your funds.
The typical choices in hardware wallets are Ledger Nano S or X, D'cent, or Trezor. I'd personally recommend Trezor considering it's open source - i.e. anybody can read its source code in its entirety at any time. Trezor is also the OG hardware wallet. Ledger and D'cent are more towards proprietary code and ease of use. They're still great wallets. Ultimately, it depends on your personal values which one you'd like to choose and how you want to maintain a balance between transparency, price, and usability.
Hope this helps. Feel free to ask questions!
