Question How do I make an android tablet with a cellular connection believe that it is a phone?

[pmennen]

It seems that android knows if it is running on a phone or a tablet. For example in settings on a phone it will have a selection "About phone" and on a tablet it will have a selection "About tablet". That's just cosmetic and I don't care about that, but it tells me that somehow Android knows if it is a phone or not. The difference that I actually care about happens with google messages. On a phone, if you start google messages and then click on the hamburger (3 lines) you see an option for "Device pairing" (which then gives you a button allowing you to scan a QR code. However on a tablet you don't get the "Device pairing" option. In its place you get an option "Pair with phone". This is a problem because this is my phone, so I don't want to pair it with my phone since that would be pairing with itself. Is there a way to tell the Android operating system (version 13 in my case) that it is actually a phone so that it will give me the device pairing option which then allows me to scan the QR code from my computer, thus pairing it to my computer? I was hoping there was such a setting under "Settings", "System" ... but I don't see anything that looks like what I need.

 

[B. Diddy]

I don't know all of the technical details, but I think this is related to a device's telephony capability (i.e., the ability to make conventional phone calls over a voice signal, not VoIP). SMS/MMS is tied to telephony, and there have been no tablets that have telephony in the US for as long as I can remember. Tablets that support LTE use that for data only, not telephony. I recall that there may have been a few old tablets with telephony in Europe, maybe around 10 years ago, but I'm not aware of any in recent years.

Let's see if anyone else knows of any hacks, but if there are any, it would probably be pretty complex.

 

[pmennen]

I had assumed that most tablets that accept sim cards could also make and accept telephone calls, but perhaps I was mistaken. In any case, the tablet I recently bought (Chuwi Hi10 XPro) is able to make and receive phone calls. (I tested it).

Also the desire to see the text messages that are sent to my tablet on my computer (the feature that caused me to post this question) has nothing to do with voice calls, although I understand it would have something to do with whether the device believes it is a mobile phone.

I just tried enabling the developer options hoping to see a setting related to this ... but alas, I didn't find anything that looked helpful.

Also, perhaps there is an app on the play store that would allow the type of pairing that I'm interested in instead of creating the pairing using the google message app. I tried a few searches on the play store, but didn't see anything like that. But it is hard to know what to search for.

~Paul

 

[J Dubbs]

Most tablets don't come with the actual radio hardware to make or receive calls, so there's no way to get it to do what a phone can through software unfortunately

 

[B. Diddy]

I had assumed that most tablets that accept sim cards could also make and accept telephone calls, but perhaps I was mistaken. In any case, the tablet I recently bought (Chuwi Hi10 XPro) is able to make and receive phone calls. (I tested it).

Also the desire to see the text messages that are sent to my tablet on my computer (the feature that caused me to post this question) has nothing to do with voice calls, although I understand it would have something to do with whether the device believes it is a mobile phone.

I just tried enabling the developer options hoping to see a setting related to this ... but alas, I didn't find anything that looked helpful.

Also, perhaps there is an app on the play store that would allow the type of pairing that I'm interested in instead of creating the pairing using the google message app. I tried a few searches on the play store, but didn't see anything like that. But it is hard to know what to search for.

~Paul

My comment about tablets not supporting telephony was primarily about devices made for the US market. Chuwi and other Chinese brands tend to do things differently, so you may still find the occasional tablet that can support telephony like that one.

For your original question, are you referring to this Chuwi tablet, or some other one?

 

[pmennen]

Yes, my original question was about the Chuwi tablet, and for my own purposes, if some solution being able to pair google messaging texts with a computer was found that worked only on my tablet, I would be happy with that. Although it seems as it would be nice if there were also a solution that worked with any tablet with a cellular interface, since google text messages have nothing to do with telephony capability.
~Paul