Help Recovering Data from iPhone

I have a huge favor to ask the people of this forum.

Last week thieves stole both my macbook pro and my external hard drive which was being used with time machine to backup my hard disk leaving me to pretty much start over again. My parents were kind enough to give me an old Toshiba laptop to hold me over until I could purchase a new one and now I am starting to piece together what I have from flash drives and other places I have data stored.

One place that things are backed up is my iPhone 3GS which has a good chunk of my music library and all my contacts. The problem is when I connect my iPhone, iTunes wants to burn it all and sync it with an empty library. Im also afraid it will erase all my contacts and photos as well. Ive found some tools that will do it for $20 or so. Is there a way for me to get the info off the iPhone without these tools or should I throw down the money?

Thank you everyone for your help!