In addition to a pair of new smartphones - the BlackBerry Pearl Flip 8220 for T-Mobile and BlackBerry Curve 8350i - RIM announced a deal with AOL that brings the AIM and ICQ instant messaging (IM) services, in addition to AOL Mail, to the BlackBerry at the CTIA Wireless show yesterday. AIL and ICQ join Yahoo! Messenger, Google Talk and Windows Messenger as major IM services with official BlackBerry clients available.

According to the companies, the free AIM and ICQ clients give users a rich IM experience that is deeply integrated with their BlackBerry smartphone. So, for instance, they'll be able to send pictures from the BlackBerry’s camera application to their friends on AIM or ICQ, as well as see AIM or ICQ messages in their regular BlackBerry inbox.

Users will also benefit from tight integration between AIM, ICQ and the BlackBerry Address Book. That means they'll be able to associate a contact in their IM contact list to the respective contact in their BlackBerry Address Book (and vice versa), which will allow them to initiate an IM session from within their BlackBerry Address Book and initiate a phone call, e-mail, SMS or MMS from within their AIM or ICQ session.

Once AIM or ICQ has been set up, an icon is automatically installed on the BlackBerry smartphone’s home screen so that access to instant messaging is a click away. Once launched on the handset, the instant messaging applications can run in the background, broadcasting the user's presence to their "buddies" and allowing immediate notification of incoming messages.

See here for additoinal features. You can download AIM and ICQ for BlackBerry there as well.

AOL Mail for BlackBerry smartphones leverages the “push” architecture of BlackBerry platform and AOL’s notification services to automatically deliver AOL Mail messages simultaneously to the user’s online account as well as to the user’s BlackBerry smartphone. The status of messages that have been sent, read, replied to, forwarded or deleted from the smartphone are automatically reflected in the user’s online AOL Mail account.

Users can create a dedicated AOL Mail inbox on their BlackBerry smartphone or choose to set up a single inbox on their smartphone to store AOL Mail as well as messages from other IMAP or POP 3 e-mail accounts.

BlackBerry smartphone users with software version 4.5 or higher will also be able to view HTML email, download attachments and edit Microsoft® Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents on the smartphone.

See here and here for info on setting up AOL Mail on a BlackBerry.