As announced on PHP.net - the latest release candidate in the PHP 5.3 series has been made available for download - PHP 5.3.0RC1.

The PHP development team is proud to announce the availability of the first release candidate of PHP 5.3.0 (PHP 5.3.0RC1). This release marks the final phase in a major improvement in the 5.X series, which includes a large number of new features, bug fixes and security enhancements.

Key features of this new release include: namespaces, late static binding, better garbage collection, mysqlnd driver support, new bundled extensions (like phar, intl, fileinfo and sqlite3) as well as many, many bug fixes. You can find out more about all of the changes in this version, check out the NEWS file and can download the release candidate from the QA site here.