Let me start with some basics.
The bitcoins are not stored in the wallet. They never "leave" the blockchain, to say so.
The wallet is just a tool helping you to access your coins (OK, especially bitcoin core does much more than that, but that's not our problem now).
A wallet will generate you a seed and/or some private keys, for which you'll see the corresponding addresses. Anybody who has the private key for an address, he can spend the coins from there.
End of the "lesson".

Now, what you need is a wallet that generates the addresses for you and allows you handle (spend) your coins.
If you only want to play with a few dollars, even a wallet like Electrum would do. It's a wallet software that work on both Android and PC (Win, Linux. iOS) and doesn't need to download the whole blockchain.
But a wallet like this is as unsafe as the device. A virus/malware can steal your money. And then, depending on your technical skills and the money you want to keep as Bitcoin, you'll go for a hardware wallet, or air-gapped PC or other safe solutions.
So the "which is safer" depends on you. Usually the answer is air-gapped computer, but if you don't know what you're doing you may lose everything (and hardware wallet may be more user friendly).