As to the phone, it should have been returned as soon as the case disposition was made official.
Sadly most of the time, the district attorney’s office does not inform local law enforcement about case disposition and when evidence is able to be released.
In a previous life, I would contact our DA’s office regularly to get exactly this information and if I was lucky, I would actually get an acknowledgement but only occasionally an answer.
IN the end I ended up making a form that was submitted to the judge with my reports that essentially stated that any “property” that was non-evidentiary would be returned to the owner at the time of sentencing.
The DA didn’t like it, I didn’t like keeping hundreds of cases worth of junk for no reason.