Below is a pic of my 8700C screen...I seem to be missing programs...I looked at the getting started guide and I don't see the programs listed in there.

http://www.damado.com/pics/bbscreen1.jpg

How do I get to the "individual e-mail activation" and cingular browser? In options, advanced, browser, it's just blank.

It seems your device is not login in the GPRS or Edge,
as soon as it does, you'll get a few more icons including the email activation icon.
Did you subscribed to a data plan?

Change you "Theme" to one of the Blackberry themes and you will get all the icons

If you see on the top right corner it says GSM and it need to be on uppercase EDGE in order to get the browser icon

Yeah I called cingular to switch from my treo 650 data plan to the blackberry unlimited data plan. She said to reboot it in 10 minutes....it's been over an hour now.

I figured that worked because the data unavailable text dissapeared, but I guess that didn't do it. I'll have to call them back I guess =/

HAVE YOU CHANGED THEMES. The standard Cingular theme does not have all the icons. Try going to Themes under options and choose another, then check out your icons

The edge dissapeared and just says GSM.

I called cingular and she said they removed my PDA data plan for the treo and apparently their system is going really slow right now so it's not adding the BB data plan =/

I was told to just wait. As a new BB user, I didn't know icons dissapeared based on service availability. That's wierd to me =/

Hopefully I'll be up and running soon. Thanks for the replies, I was going crazy!

This happened to me when I first switched to a BlackBerry. Their system was realy slow, but overnight my BlackBerry connected and was ready to go the next morning. It just takes some patience.

they tell you it takes 24 to 48 hrs for your bb plan to take effect.. just wait

[quote=DaMaDo]
I was told to just wait. As a new BB user, I didn't know icons dissapeared based on service availability. That's wierd to me =/

[quote]

It's not that the icons disappear. The Blackberry gets something called a Service Book sent over the air, which activates different functions. Until you receive the service book, you won't see the icon for that function. This is a way for the BB to keep the icons in synch with the available services. I don't believe that a service book will automatically disappear if you cancelled a service, but you would have a non-functional icon on your device. But the icons definitely do not appear for the first time until the service book is received...