One issue with using screen for these purposes is that it will silently drop \xFF bytes. In my case I was trying to pull an image off of an Arduino or RPI connected camera, and my images would arrive like 99% accurate (mostly correct headers etc) but would not open in any image viewing program. Took a long time before I realized that transferring the data via screen was causing the corruption.
The problem with this, and likely why the post was made in the first place, is screen and many other solutions are basically just a terminal emulator on your existing terminal emulator and may cause problems. screen for instance seems to make snippets I use to resize serial terminals nonfunctional, likely because it does not implement things the same as xterm-like terminals.
On the other end of the scale, if minicom doesn't have enough features, there's Kermit. Especially handy if you need to script "expect" style functionality over serial. http://www.kermitproject.org/
