One of the many innovations of the original iPhone was that it took the core functionality of a cell phone, and reduced to just being another app. Now, that app has finally arrived on iPadOS with iPadOS 26.

It might seem silly, but ever since features like Continuity Calling and Wi-Fi Calling became available, I’ve wanted a better phone call experience on iPad. If an iPad is the device you have with you, and for me it often is, you want to minimize the things you need to go find your iPhone for. With the Phone app on iPadOS 26, the calling experience goes from kind of cumbersome to virtually frictionless.

Interface

Apple’s work to build a unified Phone app experience this year was clearly done with the idea of expanding the Phone app to iPad and Mac (which also gets the new Phone app).

The left pane shows your call log, missed calls, voicemails, or spam calls, depending on which filter you select.

The right pane is your detail view, showing contact information for the caller or letting you listen to and view transcriptions for voicemails.

The Edit button in the upper-left corner lets you set or manage your avatar or Contact Poster, which also comes to iPad with this release.

I’m happy to report that two of my biggest annoyances with calls on iPad are finally solved with this app.

For one, the call screen now takes advantage of the larger iPad display. On iPadOS 18 and earlier, the call screen is a full-screen view with a phone-sized dial pad floating in the center, which is a very poor experience. This new layout feels much nicer on iPad, though I imagine some will say there’s still too much empty spacing in this layout.

Second, I’m more excited than I have any right to be that the dial pad is not full screen. It bugs the crap out of me to have experiences in an unoptimized full screen that don’t need to be (cough…calculator).

It’s clear this interface was thoughtfully designed and is a huge improvement over the blown up iPhone calling experience we’ve been stuck with for years.

Calling Features

I don’t like voicemail, but I do get one every now and again, and it’s nice that Voicemails are now available in for the first time on iPad.

The Phone app also brings the new calling features that were introduced in iOS 26:

• Call Screening – Prompts unknown callers to provide their name and reason for calling before you’re notified, so you can decide whether to answer.
• Hold Assist – The Phone app will detect when you’ve been put on hold and wait for you, so you can do other things. You’ll be alerted when a live person is available, so you can rejoin the call.
• Live Translation – Uses on-device Apple Intelligence to automatically translate conversations when a language different from your primary one is detected in conversation (I’m anxious to see this in action!),
  

What This Doesn’t Do

I’ve gotten a number of questions about whether the Phone app enables native telephony on cellular iPads…meaning you could use a cellular iPad and its assigned phone number to make calls directly. The answer is, unfortunately, no. Using the Phone app still requires an iPhone to be in the picture, whether through Continuity Calling or Wi-Fi Calling via your carrier’s plan.

Conclusion

I can’t express how happy I am to finally get a better calling experience on iPad in iPadOS 26. As someone whose phone is usually charging in another room or tucked away in a bag, I want my iPad to take on as many of my phone’s roles as possible. I want to be able to move between devices as fluidly and seamlessly as possible. And while this isn’t a standalone telephony solution, I’m just genuinely happy I can now manage calls more effectively from my favorite computer.