suse 9.0 release date
 

suse 9, the next distro that will replace suse 8.2, is now on pre-order status at amazon,s germany site. i suspect it will be on pre-order from amazon usa soon. amazon stated in the article that it will start shipping suse 9 around october 23rd.

how will it be better / different than 8.2?

not to sure, it will proabably have a updated kernal, better hardware support. will also have newer kde base, thinking it might have moziila 1.4.

Like what most new releases have, updated software/packages; packages that had security fixes, patches... and so on..

Yup, the kernel is the biggy, more support for hardware and lots of tweaks, software updates and bug fixes. Also the kernel is tweaked to support more than 1GB RAM which is giving some people problems when attempting installation (framebuffer issue). If you're running SuSE smoothly now then there's really no need to "buy" a new package - you should be able to update everything online.