Most likely not

First of all you need to find out whether such an adapter exists for iOS or Android devices - thats what I doubt the most. Mostly missing device drivers for such a port.

Really appreciate your comments mate.

It appear that the FTDI FR232R chipset has a driver for Android, which is shown to work from an terminal program. We use this USB to RS232 chip in a dongle at work. This should give me a COM port on the Android device (at least in theory).

What I don't know is if the DOXBOX supports the COM ports, I presume it does, and more importantly, if the Android ports or DOXBOX would therefore support the COM port.

Alternatively, if I installed Win3.11 on the DOSBOX, would this support the COM port.

This is all a bit out there and it may never work, but it would be interesting if it does.

By the way, I may not ever get to try it as it appears that we may be getting iPhones at work, not Samsungs anyway, and it is very unlikely that any of this will work on an iPhone.

yeah highly unlikely that this will work on the iphone.

as for your other questions, one would need to try the android ports of dosbox. and it doesn't matter whether you install win3.x in dosbox, if dosbox doesn't support the android com port, Windows 3.x in dosbox won't support it either 😀

iPhone has a TTL serial interface in the dock connector, for which iOS has a native driver.

With a jailbroken device, it might even be easier to get this working, with a relatively simple TTL-RS232 line driver.

Edit: Like so: http://namedfork.net/iphone/serial

interesting, thanks