As in, a phone that slides out to reveal a QWERTY keyboard? Because I've definitely seen phones with very similar features. If this is at all new then it's a very incremental change.

Features are more important than attractiveness

First off, there don't seem to be any new features here. That's why I was curious about its being on Hacker News. Second: there's a counterstatement to your claim, which goes something like "If they can't make the external nice, don't trust them with the internals either."