So I recently bought a Crackberry, er, Blackberry, and instantly fell in love with it. Unfortunately, the software availability for it is somewhat hit and miss. One area that really sucks is instant messenger clients. Want AIM / MSN / Yahoo / IRC / etc on your Blackberry? You'll have to pay!
Well, not quite. There are a few free AIM clients and the like out there for the Blackberry - Ramble IM is one of them, for instance. But they kinda suck.
An IM client that *doesn't* suck for the Blackberry and is free is Gtalk. There's a version of Gtalk for the Blackberry - you can download it over said Blackberry at http://www.blackberry.com/googletalk.
So now we have Gtalk on our Blackberry. But it only shows people who use Gtalk - almost useless! But Gtalk has Jabber / AIM integration, and with a bit of finesse, we can get it to the point where you can talk to your AIM contacts on your Blackberry using Gtalk.
The key is populating your Gtalk account with your AIM contacts. One way that works is to download a Jabber client (psi IM), use it to browse to an open Jabber server that has an AIM transport, register on that Jabber server with the AIM transport, and voila! Three hundred "authorize new contact" messages later and you've done it!
I'm going to have to finish up this post and fill in the details a bit later, as I can't keep my eyes open any more, but this post should cover it till I get back: http://www.bigblueball.com/forums/google-talk/36025-aim-transport-psi-google-talk.html#post203196
The open Jabber server I used was: aim.jabber.me.uk or aim.jabber.no
