KDE team proudly announced the 1st beta release of 4.9 series which[final] will be released on 1st of August this year. There are improvements, newly added features and a lot of bug fixes. I will definitely installing it once the openSUSE repos for 12.1 are populated. Will update once the repos are populated. Some of the key features from kde site:

• Qt Quick in Plasma Workspaces.
• The Dolphin file manager has improved its display and sorting and searching based on metadata.
• Deeper integration of Activities for files, windows and other resources.
• Many performance improvements and bugfixes…

Today KDE released the first beta for its renewed Workspaces, Applications, and Development Platform. With API, dependency and feature freezes in place, the KDE team’s focus is now on fixing bugs and further polishing new and old functionality.

Announcement page

Features page

Release schedule page

Are you a tester?, give it a shoot and post bug fixes to bugzilla.

Update(05-06-2012 23:50): It is available in unstable repos for openSUSE. Using it might broke your stable system. But those who love to break and make can proceed with it.

openSUSE 12.1:

http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/KDE:/Unstable:/SC/openSUSE_12.1/

http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/KDE:/Extra/openSUSE_12.1_KDE_Unstable_SC/

openSUSE 11.4:

http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/KDE:/Unstable:/SC/openSUSE_11.4/

http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/KDE:/Extra/openSUSE_11.4_KDE_Unstable_SC/

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4. Upgrade to KDE4.7.4 or later in openSUSE
5. Install KDE4.6 in openSUSE!