On question 2 I can offer a recommendation. "Stats" works very well to monitor 2G/3G, Wifi, Calls & sms usage.

 

OK!
Lets see if i can give you a help on this contacts issue...

Go to Persons/Contacts
Press Menu
See
then select/unselect the contacts you want to see.

I hope i help you, my phone is in Portuguese, so......

 

Can i ask the reason for only wanting to use phone contacts?

If all your contacts are google they are updated in gmail and on your phone and sync easily.

Useful if you ever need to reset your desire as they just sync down to the phone again

 

You HAVE too have a gmail account to use the phone, you can't take it off

 

Slaymer, I had originally set up all my contacts as phone contacts as well, but I have since changed them all to google contacts. The reason is primarily that voice dialling doesn't appear to work with phone contacts, only google (no idea why though), and there's also the automatic syncronisation with the net.
Regarding the metering, I was using 3G Watchdog, but I found over time it became innaccurate because there was no means of defining the unmetered tesltra sites (most of the bigpond stuff) in the app, so it showed higher usage than telstra was counting. Wasn't a big deal until I signed up for the free 3 month mobile foxtel subscription. A couple of hours of that and 3G Watchdog automatically killed my APN connection (using APN Droid) due to exceeding 99% of my quota, whereas my data usage in bigpond was minimal as Foxtel data is unmetered.
Now I just check it out through the 'My' tab on bigpond and have set up a usage notice SMS which alerts you at 80% data usage and then again at 100%.
I'm not sure whether "Stats" or any other apps allow you to designate unmetered URLs?