Help with iPad Identifying Phone Numbers in iMessage Send & Receive Settings / iMessage Syncing Help - iOS 6 - iPhone - iPad

Question

With iOS6, iPhone and iPad users will see that their Send & Receive iMessage settings have updated across their devices to be made available at both phone numbers and email addresses. You may have also seen alerts on one or more of your devices advising that another device is now using the same Apple ID/phone number for iMessage.
Being able to be reached on iMessage on both Apple ID and phone numbers across devices means that iMessage can keep the same thread and sync across devices.
Due to having 2 iPhones on different phone numbers running along side my iPad at one time, (whilst I was waiting for my phone number to be moved to a new provider), my iMessage settings on my iPad lost my phone number completely. I thought I would document the steps to recover this for anyone in the same boat.
1. Check that you are signed in with the same iCloud Account on both iPad and iPhone.
2. Turn off iMessage on your iPad from Settings > Messages.
3. On your iPhone, go to Settings > Messages > Send & Receive. You should see your phone number and your iCloud email address in the 'Your can be reached by iMessage at:' list. Make sure both are ticked.
4. At this point, I synced my iPhone with iTunes, then synced my iPad with iTunes.
5. On your iPad, turn iMessage back on - your phone number should now show in the 'You can be reached by iMessage at:' list. Tick the phone number. You should receive an alert on your iPhone.
This should resolve the issue.
With the above set up and with the iOS 6 updates, iMessage should now sync fine across devices however I have still found the most successful way to run iMessage is to always start new conversations from your Apple ID and to start new threads by addressing the first message to an Apple ID from an Apple ID.
To do this, go to Settings > iMessage > Send & Receive and tick your Apple ID in the 'Start new conversations from:' list, then start a new iMessage thread to the recipients Apple ID. This way, the thread will sync across iPad and iPhone. Note that a thread set up this way will not fall back on SMS, so you get a clean iMessage thread. This method also worked/works on iOS 5, as long as you send the first message of a new thread from an iPad (which can only send via Apple ID) to an Apple ID.
Hopefully this helped someone!

Answer 1

ipad has no phone number, you use a same email address for both devices. and set it in Settings>Messages>Send & Receive