China Mobile BlackBerry Curve 8320

[bgdubs7]

Hey,
I have an unlocked Blackberry curve 8320, using China Mobile's prepaid plans. I've been doing research and I'm well aware that BBM won't work here (or I've read that its just incredibly expensive, so I don't really care about that), I do want to be able to run AIM on my phone though and get a gmail app. I'm new to blackberries as a whole (first time using one) so any help would be appreciated. I already have an aim app on my phone but it won't let me log in, I heard that it has something to do with China and tried going to TCP settings and changing APN to "Cmnet", and even put in guest for both the username and password (what a quick google search told me), but nothing is working...

The reason why I want to use AIM is so that I can text people back home in the states for free (I know using the aim app on the iphone you can do this by just sending the im to the person's cell phone number). If not aim is this possible to do via the MSN, google talk, icq or yahoo messenger apps then?

Any suggestions?