How To Make And Receive Phone Calls On Your iPad

If you’ve got an iPad, it doesn’t take long to realize that it’s an entirely different device from your regular smartphone. Of course, it’s bigger than your smartphone, but that’s not the most important difference: after all, we’ve got Android tablets that are just blown-out smartphones, and can do every bit of what a compact smartphone can do.

The biggest difference to the iPad from an iPhone is that most models don’t have cellular connectivity. This means they can’t make telephone calls like a regular smartphone can. It’s only until recently that some iPad models come with cellular connectivity.

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In this post, we would be highlighting how to make and receive phone calls, for those who have an older iPad, or one that doesn’t have cellular connectivity.

The good news is that you can actually make and receive phone calls on your iPad, provided it’s running on iOS 8 or later. Starting with iOS 8, Apple introduced a feature called “Continuity”, and this particular feature is what allows you to make a phone call, right from your iPad.

The continuity feature works in cooperation with an iPhone, and just routes call from that iPhone to your iPad. While this might not be exactly “true telephony”, it is a pretty convenient feature, and perfect for those times when you have a call coming through your iPhone, but you can’t physically reach it, or times when you have an iPad around, and you don’t want to start looking for your iPhone when a call comes in.

As you might have guessed, you need an iPhone and an iPad, connected to each other on the same Wi-Fi network, and running on iOS 8 or later. Only when these prerequisites are met, you can be able to use “Continuity”

To set up the iPad for Continuity, head over to the settings, go to Facetime and toggle the “iPhone Cellular Calls” on. While at it, you can also choose to receive Facetime calls too, and choose which one of your connected phone numbers and email addresses can share your cellular connection between your iPad and iPhone, they are connected to the same Wi-Fi network.

When the Continuity feature is on, calls that are incoming will show the caller’s name, phone number and their profile picture; just as they appear in your contacts list. When the call notification appears, you can click on it, or swipe on it to answer the call. You can also respond to a call with a quick text message, for when you do not find it convenient to take the call.

Conversely, you can also make calls right from your iPad, by tapping a phone number in your contacts list (or any other number you find from your browser, for example. As you can see, it’s quite easy to make and receive phone calls from your iPad, with the Continuity feature. But bear in mind, that calls that you make or receive from your iPad are routed through your iPhone cellular connection, which must be connected to the same Wi-Fi network as the iPad itself.