Back in early 2000s I worked at company doing pharma CRM for emerging markets in rural places like central Africa, Mongolia and east Russia. We used Nokia commn

Back in early 2000s I worked at company doing pharma CRM for emerging markets in rural places like central Africa, Mongolia and east Russia. We used Nokia commnicators as a client nodes for field representives. The platform was really limited, app development was tricky, but at the end it did the job and there were very few alternatives. We actually ended up using emails as our sync mechanism: internet connectivity in places we served were as limited as you can imagine and also because of device limitation. It worked in a way that changes in data were serialized and sent to server that merged the data into the master and sent you changes back via email as well.