coming over from a dumbphone and having sprint move your contacts doesn't really help. it puts them into the phone's database not gmail's which means no syncing with gmail
You're in a smartphone world now. You have to break the dumbphone mentality which means you break ties with Mobile Sync. I think Mobile Sync was designed for dumbphones, not for smartphones because if you're using a smartphone there is the assumption you're going to be syncing info from some account be it an email based one, outlook, exchange, social network and so on.
Having all your contacts in gmail allows you to move freely from phone to phone and restoring everything by just putting in your gmail account info. It also gives you the option to edit from any computer by just going to
www.google.com/contacts. The same can be done with your calendar as well (google.com/calendar). You don't even have to use gmail in general. I just use it strictly for market transactions and emails relating to apps. Otherwise it's strictly for calendar and contacts.
Not sure how old you are, but assuming you're on the younger side, You'll have more use for a real contact manager most likely down the road. You'll get into the habit of having one entry per person with multiple numbers for that person in one entry. You'll be able to enter personal info, adr's, b-days and so on. I know many dumbphone owners that have individual entries for each number (ie. mom home, mom cell, mom work) when on a smartphone you lookup mom and get a drop down of all the different numbers.
If you don't like gmail you can always sync to outlook via Samsung's sync software. So that can be done locally from your PC without an internet connection.
There are also backup programs available in the market for a few dollars. Sprite will backup just about everything except for apps (which I'm hoping it will do soon, at least the free ones). So text msgs, calls logs, settings and so forth get written to your microSd card and can be restored once you enter your gmail account and put sprite back on your phone.