In April, Microsoft promised that the universal touch Office apps for Windows 10 Mobile—which is to say, Windows 10 for phones—would be available by the end of the month. That didn't end up happening in April. Two weeks into May, Microsoft has published a new build of Windows 10 Mobile, version 10080. With this new build comes a new beta of the Store app, and in that Store app are the new Office apps.

The new build adds support for the Lumia 930/Icon, the new Lumia 640 and 640XL, and for the first time, a non-Nokia/Microsoft phone: the HTC One (M8) for Windows. It fixes a few bugs from the previous build and introduces a few more, with MMS being notable as still having reliability issues. The big thing this release does is greatly expand the range of Universal Windows Platform apps that are available. The Office apps, Xbox, Music, and Video have all been updated, and as we'd expect from Universal apps, they show an incredible similarity to their desktop counterparts.

The most significant apps are probably the quartet of Office apps: Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote. These apps have had touch versions available for iOS and Android for some months now, with the Windows versions notably by their absence. The tablet versions of these Universal apps have been available since February. What we got today are their miniature siblings.





























































Touch Office isn't the only Universal app out there, however. The new Phone build has previews of the Xbox, Music, and Video Universal apps, as well as the new Windows Store. They're all quite similar to the apps that already exist in Windows 10. That's rather the point of Universal apps.









































The apps are taking shape, and the familial similarities between Windows 10 and Windows 10 Mobile are becoming ever clearer. But as a whole, the platform feels extremely rough. Apps crashed or went unresponsive, there seems to be all manner of weirdnesses with pinning, and most weirdly of all, a mouse cursor sometimes appears. Whenever the three navigation buttons (back/home/search) are pressed, an arrow cursor shows at the top left of the screen. Just installing the new apps and taking a tour of the apps to get some screenshots took much longer than it should have, and I had to regularly reboot the phone to make it stop acting wonky. This isn't a build that's suitable for everyday usage.