The first post on the Notes 8.5 Beta discussion forum was made on January 18th. (I didn’t know that there was one). I got a notification from a user this morning that it was available.
This beta version corresponds with the windows 8.01 release.
I knew this would be coming out this week as Lotusphere started yesterday (Sunday).
A couple of things to note. This is a beta version. It works only on OS X 10.5 (not 10.4) and the standard version only works on the Intel, not powerPC version.