Nokia And Nicki Minaj Shutdown Times Square - PHOTOS

Nokia And Nicki Minaj Shutdown Times Square
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Nicki Minaj stopped traffic in New York's Times Square last night to launch the new Nokia Lumia 900.

The singer from Queens, New York, sang Starships from her new album Pink Friday: Roman Reloaded to excited fans and shocked tourists.

The gig was a secret until the last minute, a condition of Nokia's event permit from the city. Minaj is apparently so popular, any prior warning could have caused crowd levels beyond New York's fan-wrangling capacity.

While the colour and light show was a pure and simple PR event, the tech behind it was pretty impressive.

One of the biggest electronic takeovers of New York's celebrated landmark, the show incorporated CGI technology from the team behind i-Robot and one of the world's largest LED displays taking over nine of the square's illuminated panels.

More than 5,000 hours of work went into the electronic art on the panels, which were controlled by a mobile server fed by eight miles of cable spread over four square blocks of the city.

Effects included 200ft-high computer generated graphics and a building that was made to appear as though it was filling with water and then melting onto Times Square.

The Nokia Lumia 900 is due to launch in the UK later this year. There is no word yet on whether we can expect a similar launch event in the UK, though Nokia did take over Millbank tower with Deadmau5 for the Lumia 800 launch.

If Nokia wants to wow Brits into buying the Lumia 900, the new Shard skyscraper in Southwark springs to mind as the ideal place for an all-singing, all-dancing colour and light projection show.