Last week I had a chance to experience the joy one feels while un-boxing a new gadget or electronic device. For those of you who aren’t familiar with the notion of “un-boxing,” it’s a term used by those gadget lovers in your life when they get a new device and are removing it from factory packaging.

My un-boxing last week was a new BlackBerry® Bold™ 9900 smartphone for my wife, and while going through the setup, I thought it would be a good idea to share my BlackBerry® smartphone and BlackBerry® PlayBook™ tablet post-power up steps with you. So if you are about to get a BlackBerry device or have just received one, then this is the Five Tip Friday for you.

Read more at the Inside BlackBerry Help Blog »

Now that you have your shiny new smartphone, the first thing you want to do is make sure that you get your email delivered there instead of to the old one. (It may not really be the first thing you want to do, but I’m the email product manager, so hang in there.) Making the swap is pretty straightforward.

Before we go any further, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention this article on the BlackBerry Technical  Knowledge Solution Center. It covers things like erasing your old device, moving your corporate account and more. It even has a flowchart, if that sort of thing tickles your fancy.

Moving on…

Stick your SIM card in your new smartphone (assuming it’s the type that uses one) and power it up. For you fine CDMA folks, you’ll want to call your carrier and activate the new smartphone, if you haven’t already. Then, look for the icon called “E-mail Settings”, “Personal Email Set Up”, or some variation on that wording. If your device uses the nifty theme that looks like wireframe, the icon is nestled inside the folder called “Setup”. Either way, the icon is an envelope with a gear on it. Visual aid incoming:

Click the icon. Depending on your carrier, you may have to enter a username and password to log in first. After you log in, the service will notice that you have a new smartphone, and say “Hey, you used to use PIN 1234. Do you want to change to PIN 5678?” Take a deep breath, and click “Yes”. Again, depending on your carrier, you may need to enter the passwords for any email accounts you had associated with your smartphone before. If so, go ahead and enter them as prompted until it tells you you’re done.

That’s it! You’ll start getting email on your new smartphone in about 15 or 20 minutes, and you can start sending right away. Contemplate the sweetness of your new BlackBerry smartphone as you await that first buzz of an incoming email.

-Mark