It's a pity that there isn't any official release dates scheduled... I know Pavel hates scheduling.
I don't know what Pavel has to do with this, but our experience shows that it is not wise to disclose any fixed schedules unless we're sure we can actually meet them. I.e. if I now tell you that avast 5.0 will be released on XX.XX.XXXX, and eventually we will find out that the estimate was too optimistic, it's just embarassing and generally does no good.
All I can say for now is that we're aiming for H1 2008. Please note that avast 5 will be a huge change (on almost all fronts) and so needs a lot of development time. What I can promise is that once we have some bits that we feel would be worth some external testing, you'll be the first to know.
Well if they are going to have the new poly module included for any improvement in the February av-comparitives tests then it would have to be in a regular release of avast pro. So I would suspect that it would have to be released to beta testing some reasonable time before a regular program update. So perhaps we might have something to look forward to towards the end of the year.
What Maxx said is that the new poly engine has already shipped (in one of the August VPS updates) and that they're constantly working on improving it. Regarding any "betas" of these, I just can't imagine people testing these new features (to do any reasonable testing, you'd need adequate collections of polymorphic viruses - which I doubt you guys do...

).
Thanks
Vlk