I don’t think you can buy “handies” anywhere other than Germany. At least in Norway the only people who know about that German slang term are people who like to make fun of it.
Mail post cards. Like people did in the pre-device era. I was abroad for almost three years, in Africa and the Middle east, without phoning home once. It’s amazing how few emergencies there were when cell phones had not been invented yet.
Something as small and simple as an iPod Touch will connect to WiFi and let you Skype.
Ipods may be small but they aren’t a cheap or a simple solution at my level of cheap and simple. Postcards are, yes!, cheap and simple, but they are unidirectional, and it is news from home that I want. On my side it will be just, we sang, we ate, we rode the bus. But, hey, thank you for thinking of solutions, everyone is being very creative.
If it’s just phone calls, buy an ultra-cheap cellphone when you arrive (in the UK the cheapest ones are about a fiver) and either just top it up and make calls or buy an international calling card. They’re available at most central london shops, same in Berlin, presumably the same elsewhere, and really do work out very cheap.
You simply dial in a number on the card and then dial the number you actually want to call. They also work from payphones, and there are still quite a few of those around.
This is how my international students stay in touch with home from the UK anyway.
I was in Germany at the time so “handy” is the term that I was familiar with, but, the phone worked everywhere I travelled… Spain, France, Italy, Czech Republic, Poland.
Is there anything German that people in Norway DON’T make fun of? And I’m curious… What kind of joke do Norwegians make about “handies?” 
Just don’t use the phone in your hotel room:eek:
What we don’t make fun of? Mercedes Benz. Everything else is fair game. And there are no jokes as such about “handies”, but people everywhere (not just in Norway) aware that Germans use an English word as slang for cell phone and think the word is used elsewhere as well, find it funny.
“Denglish” is actually a thing these days:
My favourite is “Dogging”. In German it means “walking your dog as a kind of sport”, in British English it means “engaging in sexual acts in a public or semi-public place or watching others doing so”.
Which of course makes this hoodie unintentionally hilarious to Brits:
http://www.amazon.de/SLEEP-DOGGING-Kapuzen-Sweat-Shirt-S-XXL-Schwarz/dp/B001MAM6J0/ref=sr_1_19?ie=UTF8&qid=1372168836&sr=8-19&keywords=dogging+hund
That’s way better than “handies”, I’m going to share that with my linguisticly interested friends.