I get that they are not really amature radio, but they are kinda neat.

I'm trying to understand how they connect to the internet. Do they need a wifi signal? Do you bluetooth them to your phone and they connect that way? Do you have to pay some sort of subscription, like it's a second cell phone?

They are VOIP devices that look like radios.   They connect via wifi and security is up to the administrator of the wifi network and whatever other networks they access via gateway.

Their typical application is to serve as as substitute for conventional hand held two way radios.  Usually they're used by private organizations (businesses, hospitals, etc) that have their own private networks.   In that situation of course they do not pay subscriber's fees.

They are entirely equivalent to conventional two way radios except for their RF topology.   Once configured think of it as a two way radio but with range limitations that are defined by the wifi network(s) that they are connected to.

One neat thing about them is that if you have a company that has multiple campuses that are some distance apart, but they share the same WAN,  the wifi radios can operate across the WAN.   So you could use a radio at the Miami shipping facility to directly talk to someone at the New York corporate office if both sites are sharing the same corporate intranet.

INR is going to be the next phase I think in 2 way comms.

But what is old is new again. Nextel did all this before.

Some of the radios allow a Sim card to take advantage of cell networks.

They even make dual band, allowing INR and conventional comms.

I actually programmed a handful of Icom's IP-100H radios for a customer yesterday. To date, this is the only time I've ever seen this system deployed and the first time I've ever programmed anything on them. They are WIFI enabled devices but will not work in a standalone configuration as they require the IP-1000C controller/server to provide their provisioning. Unfortunately, the are only 802.11a and 802.11g devices (so older standards considering 802.11n was well established at the time of the initial product release) but considering that they are very low bandwidth devices, it's not a big deal at all if you have dedicated APs for the system or have a high AP density (like you should in a corporate network).

The radios work as follows. When the unit is programmed, it is assigned a subscriber ID, programmed with the wireless info (they'll actually accept up to 10 different SSID's and encryption keys), given an IP address (if DHCP isn't being used but I would recommend using it in this application), and the IP address of the IP-1000C controller. From there, when the radio is turned back on it will access the wireless network and contact the controller. The controller will then provision the unit (sending talk group info, channel lineup and alias information) assuming that the unit has already been provisioned in the controller (which is done via a web-config GUI). Using IP tracking and Port tracking, the controller routes calls appropriately. Simple setup and I was surprisingly impressed with how easy it was to configure the units...audio quality wasn't great (not like the VoIP based phone soluitons) but it was equivalent to a non-companded 2.5 kHz deviation radio. The radios even let you define roaming thresholds but in all honesty, your AP controller should be doing that job).

Icom recently announced a new version the radio which is LTE capable but I'm not sure how it integrates with the wifi radios. While the Icom literature seems to suggest a flat network for the system (I was working on a /23 yesterday) I'm assuming that you could route this on the L3 level and have one controller handle multiple sites versus networking multiple controllers together (though there is a limit to how many fleets the controllers can handle, each "fleet" can have up to 100 subscribers).