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Yahoo CEO gives every employee an iPhone 5

According to a leaked memo Marissa Mayer, Yahoo's new CEO, has promised all employees a new Apple, Samsung, Nokia or HTC smartphone.

Yahoo's chief executive Marissa Mayer has offered Yahoo's employees an iPhone5

Yahoo is moving away from the BlackBerry in favour of brand new smartphones running iOS, Android and Windows Phone 8.

The programme is called "Yahoo! Smart Phones, Smart Fun!". Yahoo is also going to pay its employees' data and phone bills. The program applies only to Yahoo's employees in the US.

It will discontinue the use of BlackBerry phones as its corporate phones, and no longer provide IT support for the phones.

BlackBerry has rapidly lost corporate support and is now being outsold by Windows Phone in the US and elsewhere.

Research in Motion, which makes BlackBerry phones, sells less than one eighth of the number of phones that run Google's operating system, Android.

RIM is also slimming its workforce to just 11,000, compared to nearly 20,000 a few years ago. Their shares once traded at over $140; now they are at $7.25.

Yahoo employees will now have a choice of phones through the programme. The phones being offered are the iPhone 5, Samsung's Galaxy S3, the HTC One X, the HTC EVO 4G LTE, or Nokia's Lumia 920.

The programme is expected to cost Yahoo several million dollars but the idea behind it is for Yahoo employees to use the phones that Yahoo users are using.

The memo reads: "We have a very exciting update to share with you today – we are announcing Yahoo! Smart Phones, Smart Fun! As of today, Yahoo is moving off of BlackBerries as our corporate phones and on to smartphones in 22 countries.

"A few weeks ago, we said that we would look into smartphone penetration rates globally and take those rates into account when deciding on corporate phones. Ideally, we'd like our employees to have devices similar to our users, so we can think and work as the majority of our users do."

Mayer was appointed President and CEO of Yahoo in July. One of her immediate decisions was to give employees free lunch at the company's café to boost morale.