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Possession of someone else’s property without a good explanation of why you got it is pretty much evidence of participation in a theft to one degree or the other.

The device was left in some bar for crying out loud, and to quote “SeaHawkFan, :”The guy tried to give it back and Apple wouldn’t take it, the phone was abandoned property. Where’s the theft?”

You will notice Apple wasn't going after the device ~ they had that ~ they went after his pictures of the design.

Apple refused to take it back, when the original finder contacted them. That makes it abandoned property.

“The kid who busted into Sarah Palin’s emails probably thought what he did was legal ~ he's going to jail for a long time:

You are kidding right?
For the Sarah Palin email case to be the same as this one, the original finder of the iPhone, would have had to break into Apple's headquarters and stolen the device. That far from the case. The device was left at a bar.
The analogy here would be if Sarah Palin printed off her email, then left the printed email at a bar, and some kid found the email and read it. No one would be charging the kid of that is what had happened.

No, the analogy would be some engineer leaves the blueprints for a nuclear trigger on a barstool, the guy that finds them calls a 1-800 number and speaks to someone who doesn't know what he's talking about, and puts them up for sale to the highest bidder, who then posts the blueprints on the internet.

Then, someone on FR appears to claim "no harm, no foul."

Joe, it's the same. When you have a piece of property that you know is not yours, and you have no bill of sale, and you contact the owner your only course of action is to GET A BILL OF SALE or other recognized document wherein they formally reject their claim to the property.

You have no other choices.

There's no "I made a phone call and they said it's OK" exception.