HELSINKI (AFP) - The world's leading mobile phone maker Nokia acknowledged Friday some of its new flagship N8 smartphones, which it hopes will help re-take lost market share, are simply dying.

Some customers are reporting that their N8 turned off unexpectedly without any way to turn them back on, or refused to power on at all.

"It's a very small number of phones, we don't have exact numbers," company spokesman Tapani Kaskinen told AFP on Friday.

The company said that complaints of the problems have emerged in the press in recent days, prompting Nokia to release a video interview Thursday with Executive Vice President Niklas Savander in which he said he was "concerned" about the flaw.

"We have dressed it down to the way we assemble the engines," Savander said, adding that the company has taken "precautionary measures" across their product line to weed out the problem.

The problem is covered by the phone's warranty, and if the original handset can't be fixed then the customer will be given a new one, Kaskinen said.

The N8, which is the company's first handset to run the Symbian 3 platform, was released in October.

It is the company's push to win back smartphone market share which has been pecked away over the past year by Apple's iPhone, Research in Motion's Blackberry, and handsets running Google's Android operating platform.

On Thursday, Fitch ratings agency downgraded Nokia to BBB+ from A-, citing a loss of overall market share as well as market share for the Symbian operating system.