BlackBerry users have a reputation for being hyper-productive business professionals that are almost pathologically tied to their smartphones. As of today, however, they can be Slackers, too. Research In Motion has announced a partnership with Slacker.com that will let BlackBerry users play Internet radio stations.

You can stream music, or even better, cache stations and individual songs on your BlackBerry's memory card, so you can listen when you have zero bars of coverage. Just listening to stations is free, but you need to subscribe to Slacker's premium service ($10 a month) to save individual songs.

As a doting owner of a Blackberry Curve 8330 and a daily listener to Slacker Radio, I am pretty psyched. This is the kind of app RIM needs, to win the hearts and thumbs of consumers and compete with the iPhone 3G. I've played with the service very briefly, and the interface looks pretty clean and easy to use. I can't speak to the audio quality yet, but I guarantee it will sound better than the music most current BlackBerry owners listen to on their phones--which is to say, none.