I may be the last person still using serial. Sparkfun has a SMD RS232 breakout board that looks handy if you need a serial connection with a level converter. It comes assembled and has two LED activity indicators. No need to wire up a MAX232 and add caps! When you wire it up from the breakout PCB to mbed connect TX-RX and RX-TX and use 3.3V for VCC. (i.e, not 5 for VCC and not TX-TX and RX-RX)

sometimes I use an old laptop as a terminal. It has no USB so this is very handy :)

They are also available from the UK at:

http://www.skpang.co.uk/catalog/product_info.php?cPath=188&products_id=638

If you need to use handshaking, take a look at this one http://www.pololu.com/catalog/product/126

Thanks Jim for the recommendation, I bought one from Coolcomponents.co.uk, works a treat!

You’re not the last person using a serial. I work with embedded systems and it’s still widely used in the industry as a standard of choice. Thank you for the recommendation, it certainly looks like it can be handy, I’ll have a look whenever I get a chance.

http://www.7pcb.co.uk

We use serial all the time. Almost every embedded type processor comes with several serial ports. Something else that's hard to find are serial standalone modems. Most mainframe I/O devices use serial for connecting to testing equipment. It will never go away.